Major Pains: Choosing College Classes

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Caution

Don’t get too excited about those fancy classes with the fancy titles that you’d like to sign up for. Not every course is offered every semester. In fact, reading the school’s catalog is about as accurate as my mother’s psychic abilities. The semester schedule is the best way to go on this one. You can have it mailed to you, free of charge, before you sign up for classes at your chosen college. The downside is that if you don’t choose that particular school, you’ve just put yourself on their junk-mail list.

www.RateMyProfessors.com is a place where you can view your professor’s report card, which is wickedly rated by the students.

Other College Classes You Might Have to Take

For Baby Boomers, take at least one computer, how-to course. Otherwise, your preparedness would be like a carpenter showing up to re-do the floorboards without a hammer. Then again, you could always lend him or her that jackhammer your professor made you buy.

Everything has gone hi-tech: registering online, getting school-related announcements sent via email, and even your grades. I know you’ve been putting it off. You just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Right? Learning computers was a scary thing for me, at first. I stared at a “mouse” for 30 minutes before I could figure out what its use was. It’s hard to keep up, especially with ongoing innovations.

College Language Proficiency

¿Habla Español? Some colleges require proficiency in a language, other than the English language, in order for you to graduate. High-school foreign language courses count, so you’re probably off the hook in that case. If you’ve watched Russian Bay Watch on occasion, then you’ll simply have to demonstrate your multi-language abilities, via an exam.

Spanish is not the only language available, even though it’s probably the most useful in the United States. Polish, Chinese, German and other languages are an option, especially if you’ve been dying to tell your neighbors off in French.

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* Cohen, Patricia. “Freud is Widely Taught at Universities, except in the Psychology Department.” The New York Times 25 Nov. 2007: Education.

** Glater, Jonathan D. “Training Law Students for Real-life Careers.” The New York Times. 31 Oct. 2007.

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