This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Harvard chapter.
Welcome back to campus!
Not so happy to be back? Think of the arctic weather as a hug from Cambridge. Or a frigid embrace from a relative you don’t like very much.
Class shopping starts on Monday and HerCampus has a few tips for navigating CampHarvard.
- Know thyself. Shopping week is not the time to reinvent yourself. If you would regret not shopping a ton of classes, then go ahead and shop two-three courses an hour. If you are completely catatonic until noon, then it’s probably a stretch to shop a class that meets at 10.
- Break it up. Looking for courses can be overwhelming unless you organize your search into chunks. There are many ways to do this: by department, by requirement, etc. One time-efficient way is to shop by weekday; look at what courses are offered the following day and save looking through classes that meet on a different schedule for tomorrow.
- It’s the little things. If a professor’s voice puts you to sleep—or makes you wish you were asleep—then having a high CUE score doesn’t matter that much. If you spot a gorgeous T.F. who will completely distract you in lecture…Well, you should probably take the class anyway.
- Read the fine print. Course requirements are pretty clear from syllabi, but even wording can also be indicative of the class’s tone. It’s sort of like in online dating. If you ignore red flags like “I’m single because I’m too nice”—or “I don’t believe in ‘on Harvard time’”—it comes back to haunt you.
- Don’t sit in the front of the classroom if you know you’re going to bounce in ten minutes. Yeah, I don’t have a short tagline for this. Just don’t do it. It makes the rest of us look bad.
Happy shopping! It’s pretty much the cheapest shopping there is; unless you believe in the maxim “Time is Money,” in which case, sorry.