What were you doing last Wednesday morning? Did you have three consecutive existential crises about the state of your course registration worksheet? Did you set an alarm for an ungodly hour and oversleep, only to realize all the classes you wanted to take were full? Did you have eight courses on your registration worksheet and only two confirmed? If so, welcome to the club; it’s course registration week, besties, and God do we wish the odds were in our favor.
If your Wednesday was like mine, you woke up to not one, not three, but five consecutive alarms at 7:38 a.m. to prepare for course registration at 8:00 a.m. This was not a panic-induced freshman move—no, no—I was committed. I had a semi-solid plan, my CourseTable worked (kind of), and I just wanted to lock the courses down and get on with my day. No drama, no shenanigans, just a couple of prerequisites and an art class “for funsies.”
That’s not quite what happened. Because this semester, the little registration button on Course Search came with a little timer. And as soon as it hit 15 seconds, the anxiety kicked in.
Was I really going to take Game Theory and Intermediate Micro in the same semester? Yes. (Hint: I was not.) Did I think that an English class with a 3.9 workload rating was manageable with said Econ classes? Apparently. (For reference, it is not on my registration worksheet anymore.) Was I questioning all my life choices the second the little “add to worksheet” button unlocked? Most definitely.
But alas, I had my plan—and a very reassuring, highly emotional “you’ll be fine” text from my dad that I received after I sent him a picture of my CourseTable. So here I was, loading 5+ credits worth of classes onto my registration worksheet, convinced that averaging a workload of 3.4 was “fine.” Ha!
Half an hour later, I sat in the Murray dining hall for breakfast—feeling neither delicious, delightful nor delovely—and decided that I needed to completely revamp my entire schedule. I was already past “shenanigans” and into the realm of “hyperventilation,” which was really the opposite of what I had planned for the day. It was only 8:30 a.m.
In hindsight, I might have been a little too dramatic.Yes, my class situation wasn’t ideal (I did end up dropping Game Theory) and I’m still waiting on a couple of instructor permission requests, but hey! I didn’t have to fill out two-page applications for seminars I’m not even eligible for as a first-year.
Let’s hope that more of those check marks pop up on our registration worksheets in the coming days. And, if not, you can always spam the professors and tell them how you’d absolutely die if you couldn’t take their courses. Quantity over quality—you need to be memorable to get into those capped senior seminars as a first-semester sophomore. Keep sending those emails. Plus, even if Biology, The World and Us doesn’t work out for you this year, who knows? The science credit you didn’t want to take might be right up your alley.
There are about 4,700 undergrads at Yale, and they all need at least 4 credits (or 5.5, if you’re into the really hard-core stuff)—so who can blame me for my semi-rational freshman crisis?
