University Course Selection
Posted on August 25th, 2008 in QOTW, School/IB Program |
As we get nearer to the start of the school year - September 2nd for me - it’s time to cue course scheduling headaches. I originally registered 48 hours after the official start date because 1) I wasn’t planning on coming to UBC and 2) I mixed my timezones while I was in China (loser, I know ><). Now being the perfectionist that I am, I’m agonizing over my timetable, ranking courses by a point system, making multiple excel charts for booklists etc. etc.
Below are the main criteria
How interesting is the course? Physics get’s -4 while say… PoliSci gets 5 (on a scale of 1-5 XD). I’m taking on loads of electives because I’m apparently interested by EVERYTHING, which isn’t good.
Does it fit my time slots? I plan to work two jobs part-time during first term, so most of my classes have to be in the morning. In term 2, I want Tuesdays and Thursdays off so it creates all kinds of complications.
How easy are the teachers and how light is the workload? Okay let’s not kid ourselves here. As much as university is a course for the pursuit of knowledge and higher academic excellence, that bloody GPA counts for grad school!
How much are the textbooks? Yes this is actually a criteria. I dropped French Literature because of this… I’m not spending $130 bucks for a cahier that I’m gonna use for three months which has a resale value of $20 (oh and it conflicted with other classes).
QOTW: How do you pick your courses/what factors influence you? How reliant are you on Ratemyprofessors.com?
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I'm Crystal, a Canadian who thinks she can take on the world simply by getting up each morning. They call me the caffeinated IBer wandering on the Internet. 
13 Responses
LOL! Good luck with course selection!
I can only choose to take four courses the fall semester and five courses the spring semester…and I have core courses to take, so I really only get one or two electives. If I decide to go pre-med, I’ll have practically no electives
I think I might take English, Math, Chinese, and Biology the first semester. I’ll have to see my placement exams to see which exact courses though…
Haha, I hate Physics too! *high five* Biology all the way!
I don’t know how light or heavy your workload is, but two part-time jobs sounds like a lot. You do mean two part-time jobs per day, right? Or is it one job per day? If it’s two, depending on how many courses you take, you may want to drop one, because you should also take a look at the extracurriculars
And don’t overwork yourself!
Does the course sound interesting? What requirements, if any, does it fulfill? When and where does it meet? Will I have to change my work schedule for this class? Is it traditional lecture, web-enhanced, or online only? Does this course require custom textbooks? How much are the textbooks? Etc. Etc.
I usually go to class on the first day and see if I like it. If I don’t for whatever reason (boring professor, overly-heavy load, etc), I drop it and go to a different one on the second day.
I look at the rate-a-prof sites sometimes, but it doesn’t have much of an influence. I tend to disagree with the ratings/reviews of ones I’ve already had.
Two jobs + school is a pretty heavy load. Make sure to make time in your schedule just for relaxing and such.
I pick the classes I need for my major and ones that are interesting.
At my university, there’s no real point in using Ratemyprofessors.com because some classes are taught only by one professor. However, it does come in handy sometimes.
As for scheduling, I figure out what I need to take, if some classes need to be taken before others and what will fit. I already have a plan set out (yes, I do all the excel spreadsheets too) so I just need to make sure that I can fit everything.
One thing that I do is I list all the possible choices I have for my schedule. For example, if a class has three different discussion sections, then in my Excel sheet, I will put those in the chart along with all the lecture times. From there, I figure out what I can do and what will work best for me.
Good luck with your scheduling and hope it all turns out well for you!
How I choose my classes:
What are my major (or intended major) requirements? Is it potentially interesting?
You’re lucky that you can choose time slots for your first semester - we just picked what classes we wanted, and they were scheduled for us. D: (Unless we made a last minute schedule change, dropped/added a class… then we could pick.) I can’t wait until I can choose my time slots - no labs until 10 PM for me anymore!
I am sad to see that Physics is not interesting to you.
I would give it a -4 on the Fun scale, but it would be up there on the Interesting scale!
I wouldn’t rely on sites like ratemyprofessors.com because you don’t know what type of student/person is writing the comments… many people might say, “HE’S SUCH A HARD PROFESSOR~!” when they were too lazy to study and do the work. Or they might say “GREAT PROFESSOR!” because they never had to do any work.
How have I never heard of ratemyprofessors.com?!
In the past, I’ve always selected courses based on 1) my interest field (which has always been science) and 2) how easy it will be for me actually get through the coursework (this is based on my interest field; for example, in high school, socials was the bane of my existence - naturally, it was much more painstaking to get through socials than it was to get through chem or any other of the sciences) … and from there, I would try to work around everything else.
Good luck with your course selection / upcoming first year!
Good luck with that! Over here, we don’t really get to “pick” courses. We have to pick a general field at the start of college/uni and all our courses are compulsory from there on.
For my very first semester of uni, classes were picked and scheduled for me. Yeah, for some reason, they do that do all freshmen, so that they don’t have to go through “finding classes on their own”.
I think our uni works rather differently from most American and Canadian unis, since you have to decide your major when you are applying for admission. You can change it later, of course, but that puts you behind. So your admission probabilities depend on how many people apply to for that major. They take your GPA and SAT score to generate a score from 0 to 400. If a program (major) has 100 spaces for freshmen, they admit the students with the 100 highest scores. So if very little people apply for a certain major, you have higher chances of being accepted to uni, through hat program.
Anyway, since we enter with declared majors, they make your first semester schedule to include only classes that are required for absolutely everyone (English, Spanish, Intro Western Civilization and Intro to Social Sciences) and one or two that are required for your major. In my case I had the four classes I mentioned, plus math.The next semester I did the continuations of the basics, plus a different math, but I had the chance to pick the time, the professors, etc.
In my second year I completed the rest of my basics, another year of Spanish (literature), another year of Western Civ,; bio and more math for my major, and some art and anthropolgy electives.
Now that my “basics” are done, all I have are upper division bioclasses and I have basically nothing remotely easy to balance them with. I have electives left but I’m planning to use them on a second major, so hopefully that will help.
So I don’t have much room for choice here, since the classes for my major are fixed (with only three major-oriented electives), plus the free electives that I’m saving for when I get notified if I was accepted for a second major in anthropology. Basically the only thing I can choose is the time of the class and the professor. This year I’m at uni from 7am to 5pm, including my job on campus that is 10hours/week, four classes and three (LONG) labs. My schedule is pretty tight this semester , it’s rather depressing
Our uni was not at Ratemyprofessors.com the last time I checked, so I don’t use it, but there is a similar website for unis in Puerto Rico and I sometimes check it. Like if, I’m registering for a class and see that a certain professor’s section is empty while the rest are flooded, I think there might be something fishy about the prof. XD If it’s something stupid like “OMG HE GIVES 2 MUCH WORK!!1″ I ignore it, but if it’s something more serious, then I think about it before registering
Wow… this was a veryyy long comment
After my first year of college I learned it’s best not to buy any books for classes until at least a week into the class to see if it’s a book you think you’d want to keep and to see if it’s used in class. If not, just take good notes and study from them. I seldom read the books anyway and graduated cum laude, maintaining a B average all the way through the four years.
I’ve long since finished my university education, but I always picked classes in a broad range. Being a history major, I would do no more than two history classes per semester since they are very reading and writing intensive. I would also try to stack my classes so that I was taking two level 100/200 and two level 300/400. The difference in difficulty level let me focus the appropriate time on the harder classes since the others were fairly light.
I didn’t pay much attention to professor rating sites at all.
I’m not in university yet, but my schedule is pretty tight for high school. It seems I won’t have any free time at all this year.
I’ve never used ratemyteachers.com. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been on that website.
In undergrad, my system was much like Freya’s - you apply to a department straight off the bat (instead of the university) and then all your courses are chosen & scheduled for you. The only choice I had was my subfield, and those subfield courses were also chosen & scheduled for me. Naturally, the second I left that totalitarian, repressive system (lol) and came to grad school, I went crazy because there are SO! MANY! CLASSES! That I can CHOOSE! ALL BY MYSELF! It’s a brave new world!
My program only has three core classes, all of which I chose to take this semester, but I did have a wide range of professors to choose from for two of them and I went with the ones that got the best reviews from all the second-year MA students I know. So far, I’m very satisfied with all my choices. In late October, I’ll get to register for the spring, but before that I have to formulate a (non-binding, thankfully) “substantive” field and a “related” field, to sort of guide me through the program. So far I’m thinking of doing international organization (organizations, international law and international cooperation) as my substantive field and either development in Africa or political analysis of development as my related field, so my course choice will depend on: a) my interests; b) how good the professor is; c) whether I can tie it to my field(s). This program is SO flexible that I’m kind of going crazy here - it’s like some inner spirit has been unleashed or something