Table for One: Registration Hell
It’s like the time in the tenth grade when Jenna Kravikowski accidentally-on-purpose leaked the invite list for her “American Idol”-themed sweet sixteen. You overhear it in the halls, in the elevator.
“What’s going on?” you ask.
“Haven’t you heard? The List has been posted.”
Only this time it’s worse. Because unlike Jenna’s sweet sixteen, which was old news before the end of the week, this list dictates a full semester of your life. A full semester of the Golden Age — the best years, the ones you promised to take full advantage of, the last four years of the Good Ole Days and the first four years of the rest of your life.
"The List?" I asked.
“The Spring Semester Course List.”
This will be my last semester at Lang before I graduate in May. With nearly all of my requirements out of the way, I finally get to decide my own schedule. What do I want to study? What kind of student do I want to be? Eclectic Dabbler? Foreign Language Enthusiast? Senior Slacker?
I turned to The List for some answers, but It seemed like each course description posed a new question:
“What new forms of sociality have emerged around cerebral conceptions of the self?”
“Do anthropological accounts of post-colonial Africa confirm that it is a place of chaos and violence?”
“Does the lack of a word for blue imply an inability to see blue?”
“Is the economic understanding of human behavior descriptively accurate and prescriptively sound?”
“Can poetry save the earth?”
“What is justice?”
My mind was reeling — I was on the very brink of a total psychological breakdown.
Ah, here we go.
Buddhist meditation. “Students learn the fundamentals of developing a meditation practice with the goal of learning how to apply these principles to their everyday life.”
Lang at Scratch DJ Academy. “This course introduces students to the art of DJing with master DJ Rob Swift at the nearby facilities of Scratch DJ Academy.”
Maybe it’s best that I spend my senior year meditating and DJing. I thought to myself. Let the combined forces of Buddha and DJ Rob Swift ease me into the Real World.
And then it hit me: even if I do come to some kind of conclusion on how to live out my last semester of college, it’s entirely possible that I don’t even make it into the classes I want to take. It’s not like those ’80's movies where students waited in line to register and could muscle their way to front. With online registration, you don’t know who’s taken your seat in class, only that it’s been taken and, beyond sending a desperate email to the professor, there isn’t a thing you can do about it. I could try to register for “Plato’s Republic” and end up being cornered into taking woodworking! (Does Lang even offer woodworking? That would actually be pretty cool. Note to self: Research woodworking course.)
I considered tearing the list to shreds, arranging the scraps to form some cathartic obscenity and setting fire to it. Alas, The List only exists online. I considered printing it out, but then I remembered that my university print credit is running low.
“What’s going on?” you ask.
“Haven’t you heard? The List has been posted.”
Only this time it’s worse. Because unlike Jenna’s sweet sixteen, which was old news before the end of the week, this list dictates a full semester of your life. A full semester of the Golden Age — the best years, the ones you promised to take full advantage of, the last four years of the Good Ole Days and the first four years of the rest of your life.
"The List?" I asked.
“The Spring Semester Course List.”
This will be my last semester at Lang before I graduate in May. With nearly all of my requirements out of the way, I finally get to decide my own schedule. What do I want to study? What kind of student do I want to be? Eclectic Dabbler? Foreign Language Enthusiast? Senior Slacker?
I turned to The List for some answers, but It seemed like each course description posed a new question:
“What new forms of sociality have emerged around cerebral conceptions of the self?”
“Do anthropological accounts of post-colonial Africa confirm that it is a place of chaos and violence?”
“Does the lack of a word for blue imply an inability to see blue?”
“Is the economic understanding of human behavior descriptively accurate and prescriptively sound?”
“Can poetry save the earth?”
“What is justice?”
My mind was reeling — I was on the very brink of a total psychological breakdown.
Ah, here we go.
Buddhist meditation. “Students learn the fundamentals of developing a meditation practice with the goal of learning how to apply these principles to their everyday life.”
Lang at Scratch DJ Academy. “This course introduces students to the art of DJing with master DJ Rob Swift at the nearby facilities of Scratch DJ Academy.”
Maybe it’s best that I spend my senior year meditating and DJing. I thought to myself. Let the combined forces of Buddha and DJ Rob Swift ease me into the Real World.
And then it hit me: even if I do come to some kind of conclusion on how to live out my last semester of college, it’s entirely possible that I don’t even make it into the classes I want to take. It’s not like those ’80's movies where students waited in line to register and could muscle their way to front. With online registration, you don’t know who’s taken your seat in class, only that it’s been taken and, beyond sending a desperate email to the professor, there isn’t a thing you can do about it. I could try to register for “Plato’s Republic” and end up being cornered into taking woodworking! (Does Lang even offer woodworking? That would actually be pretty cool. Note to self: Research woodworking course.)
I considered tearing the list to shreds, arranging the scraps to form some cathartic obscenity and setting fire to it. Alas, The List only exists online. I considered printing it out, but then I remembered that my university print credit is running low.
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