Halfway through the quarter, you open your student portal. Alas! Your time ticket seems to be awfully late. What a shame. You consult your friends and classmates who all have a time ticket a week or two before you. You won’t be able to get the classes you had planned for, which will majorly set you back, and now you’ll graduate in 10 years. You wish you hadn’t made that four year plan — so much work just to have such a late time ticket! Perhaps you should have just planned your schedule minutes before registration.
But now, clearly, the best plan is to work with the scraps you’ll be left with and make a term plan the night before your time ticket. But the universe has once again played a cruel joke on you, and somehow, the classes you planned to take that night are full, and you’re left with 8 a.m. classes every day. So what is the best plan when faced with such a terrible predicament?
A case for planning in advance
The evil villain that is class registration is unbeatable, but you can take your future in your hands and grip it tight. Historically, the classes offered in each term do not differ terribly, so you can make a reasonable plan for what classes you need to take and during what quarters, which can give you a good sense of when you will graduate. While you can follow the course plan made by the advisors for your major, many spots in your schedule are left open by the breadths you need to take, not to mention the prerequisites you need to actually register for the class. A class might be better to take before another simply by virtue of how many classes it will unlock for you in the long run.
It also helps to predict what each class has in store for you. How difficult will it be to balance four hard classes versus two hard classes and two breadths? Does this class have a lab? Such mysteries can be answered beforehand. Thus, you won’t be scrambling the night before and mourning your sleep schedule the next quarter as you pick up whatever class you stumble across that fulfills a requirement in your degree audit. The weight of graduation and completing requirements is massively lifted by creating a four year plan.
Be ready to adapt
However, things will not always turn out how you planned. No matter how detailed your plan, or no matter how painstakingly you had entered all the historical class offerings into an Excel spreadsheet to craft your schedule, at some point, you may be dealt a bad hand and be left with a less than desirable registration time. This is simply out of your control, so it is best to be flexible and leave some leeway in your plans in case your planned classes are full.
Your future is so much more than a late-night panic. It is always within your control, so fight for the future you want, and create a four year plan!
