It’s November—that time of year when every laptop screen in your 300-person lecture transitions from Instagram to CourseTable. Instead of watching reels about cake making or stalking high school exes, students stare at brightly colored blocks of blue and red, playing Tetris with their class schedule. Half-listening to Steven Berry’s game theory lecture, they engage in a strategic game of their own: trying to maximize the number of classes they can take while minimizing the workload they will have to take on.
Crafting a schedule that fulfills your distributional requirements, counts towards your major, and doesn’t make you question whether you should have gone to Harvard is more work than some of the courses themselves. Just keeping track of the number of credits you need to graduate should count as a QR credit. As for the language requirement? I’ve probably completed that just by reading so many L1 syllabi.
Don’t get me wrong; I love CourseTable. Had I not read the review of Professor Kaczmarek’s Musical Acoustics and Instrument Design course saying, “I spent 10 hours a day in the CEID for the last two weeks of class,” I would probably be suffering through that course for the sake of a precious science credit. But the website can trick you, especially when you filter classes by workload. Press that magic button at the top of the screen, and a mirage appears—dozens of highly-rated classes with low workloads. After glancing at the titles, you’re convinced that you’ve found the perfect course. But wait! Before you get too attached, click on the description. Chances are it’s a First-Year Seminar, and although you still act like one, you are not a first-year in the eyes of the Yale Registrar.
But CourseTable isn’t the problem. The registration process is. For some classes, registering is simple enough: you just add a course to your worksheet, and a beautiful, black checkmark appears, confirming that you have secured your place. Of course, if you want to ensure that you get your top choices, you’ll have to wake up at 8 a.m. on the day of course registration, but that is a small price to pay to avoid a semester of agony. For other classes, though, registering can be demoralizing. I’ve labored over instructor permission requests, gushing about how it would be “so beneficial to engage with Tolstoy’s work in a seminar setting” or how “taking Dynamic Earth will help me gain a greater appreciation for the environment,” only to find out that a football player who wrote “I need a writing credit” or “I <3 rocks for jocks” got in over me.
And then there’s the creative writing classes. I was put on the waitlist for Susan Dominus’s Journalism class. Frankly, that’s shocking considering the important topics I report on for the Herald (see my article on my moldy water bottle or my glowing review of the women’s restroom at The Graduate). But I’m not the only one. Yale’s creative writing classes have become increasingly competitive as more and more students enroll in the Writing Concentration. While other departments merely ask students to fill out instructor permission requests for popular classes, creative writing class applications ask students to provide their class histories, resumes, publications, and writing samples. Some, such as Anne Fadiman’s “Writing About Oneself,” even require a cover letter explaining why the student is a good fit for the class.
My final complaint about course registration is the hell that is Shopping Period. I remember hearing my Yale tour guide rave about Shopping Period, telling me that it allows students to try out courses without commitment or any pressure to do coursework. What Yale Admissions doesn’t tell you is that professors begin monitoring attendance during the first week of the semester, so if you want to shop multiple classes in the same time slot, you’re out of luck. Plus, now that Yale keeps shortening Shopping Period, there isn’t much time to explore classes to begin with.
Despite all my qualms with the registration process, I’d be a liar if I said that logging on to CourseTable isn’t exciting. Exploring the site is like going thrifting, looking for gems amongst stained t-shirts and oddly shaped jeans from the ’80s. Sure, sometimes you see something promising on the rack only to pick it up and find an obnoxious graphic covering the front (the clothing equivalent of “Enrollment limited to first-year students.”). Other times, though, you stumble upon a comfy, perfectly oversized sweater (read: Michael Warner’s Henry David Thoreau class).
