Better Schedule, Better You

by AnnaLiese Burich ‘17

It’s that time of year again: the holidays! You know Halloween, and Thanksgiving and Christmas, but did you know the greatest holiday of them all? COURSE REGISTRATION!

This excitement sounds facetious, but the day the Schedule of Classes (www.usc.edu/soc) is released for next semester really is my favorite day of each semester. Course registration is a time to reinvent yourself: you can expand your horizons, fix your mistakes from last semester, and be productive and tick items off of the checklist of your STARS report. Since I may be alone in loving SOC time (Schedule of Classes time), I thought I would share some of my trains of thought during this time period to help spread the excitement and expertise honed after years of pro scheduling.

Pay attention to timing.

Yes , I know 8 am classes are not ideal, but there is a lot to pay attention to in regards to scheduling beyond simply “Avoid 8 ams.”

Think about your schedule now, and think about how you work. A well-crafted timing of your schedule could be the difference between weekly all-nighters and getting 10 hours of sleep.

For example, if you have an 8 am, or a 9:30, you’ll be forced to be up and about and productive all day. If you have your first class of the day at 7 pm (like I do now) there will be no incentive for you to wake up and get working. And, I hate to break it to you, but you need to work now if you want to be able to also have a social life. Think of each hour earlier you wake up as an extra hour of reading you can do during the day, and an extra hour of brunch you gain on the weekend since you’re so caught up on work.

Also, pay attention to the amount of time between classes. Do you have enough time to eat lunch and dinner? If you don’t, then start over with your scheduling. Homedawg gotta eat if you want to stay sane/healthy/successful. Also, if you have around 2-3 hours between classes (as I try to do), it’s great built-in-study time. It’s not enough time to go home and watch TV and too much time to have lunch. Instead of sitting on campus and twiddling your thumbs, bust out that book and get working!

Expand your horizons.

This is one I have to remind myself to follow as well. My first instinct is to take classes about things that I’m already very interested in and know a lot about, but it might behoove us to take classes outside of our comfort zone. Now, I know it isn’t fun to take a class that you hate, but take a class with something that you’ve always been vaguely interested in, or that topic that your friends always talk about that you wish you knew more about. 

College is about being able to kill at cocktail party small talk—when you bust out that knowledge about Baudrillard at a party, people will just know you’re smart. My motto is to know a little about a lot of things (but don’t worry, I know a lot about a few things, too). College is your chance to become more cultured! Take it!

Also, take those fun extracurricular classes that are free with your tuition but will cost money after college! Take ballet! Take jazz! Take surfing! Take improv! If you want to learn those things now, you should learn them for free now so you don’t have to drop $70000000000 on them post-grad when you still will want to learn them.

Don’t take classes based purely on ratemyprofessors.com.

Just because one person gave a teacher a bad review does not mean that the teacher is bad. Especially if the class is in your major, keep in mind that a lot of the people on ratemyprofessor.com are non-majors, taking the GE version of the class, and seem to generally be averse to learning.

In my experience, there’s a code to actually understanding the truth of the site. If someone says “This teacher sucked and gave sooooooo much work,” really that means that the teacher is extremely knowledgeable, passionate, and will change your life and make you learn a lot. If someone says “So easy. Take this class. There is no work.” then really the teacher will drone on about nonsense and you will be driven to go on Facebook the whole class. While this is tempting, I know you all are at USC because you secretly love learning, and it’s a lot less boring to be engaged in class and learn stuff than bored out of your mind and wasting that cash money money of the tuition dollars.

 Okay, those are the major tips I have. Please go forth and learn! Force yourself to work! Force yourself to learn new things! You won’t regret it. I really really promise.