About Us
The last moment to drop or add a class on Boston College’s archaic, Pacman-feeling UIS registration system—you know, the same one your weird uncle who’s a lot older than you used when he went to BC—was midnight, Wednesday.
And if you have any regard for this sort of official University deadline, this technically means that you can’t change your course schedule. What you see for your four, or five, or six classes, is what you are going to get for the next 10 or so weeks, unless you withdraw from a class or pull some magic with your dean.
This also means that if you don’t like your courses, or wish you had taken a more open-minded approach to things, it’s too late. The shopping is over, and while many people may not be content with their schedule, I believe that’s a good thing. BC students need to venture out of their academic comfort zones and commit to classes that, however random or antithetical to their academic goals they seem, provide two things: A potential for tapping curiosity and exposure to real-world connections.
Picture a chemistry or biology major that picked a random UNAS (university studies) course like public relations. Even if the course has nothing to do with this student’s core academic identity, you could suppose that the backbone skills of communications and writing are applicable to nearly any major across any field. That student now knows how to write well for an academic journal and can ace interviews for medical school without breaking a sweat.
Now, picture a communication major, whose go-to class might be public relations, and throw them in a bio lecture, or even worse, some 500-level seminar on molecular biology. It makes no sense to intentionally take the course, but the seemingly unexpected and absurd can often be of use. College is a time to discover and re-discover, and if you enter one semester thinking you’re a bio major and leave for break a communications major, you’re not alone.
This argument is meant to be more of a contingency plan if things don’t go the way you hoped rather than a call to quadruple-major and hole up in Bapst like it’s the apocalypse. There are left-brainers and right-brainers for a reason.
But if you do end up in a class that’s out of your league or awfully boring, don’t bring your computer to class to distract you. Find something – anything - in the professor’s material to get you interested in the topic. Also, consider the fringe benefits of any class you take at BC. The professors you meet and your classmates can be a resource for networking or expanding your social boundaries.
Sometimes you can’t curate your schedule perfectly to your needs, but when something goes wrong, don’t sit around and wait for the semester to pass. The connections, experiences and untapped passions that await you are worth it.
Born in New York, from Philadelphia, but meant to live in New England.
