Congratulations! You”ve made it through “silly week!”
The first week of school is primarily used for professors to introduce their courses and hand out syllabi to their new batches of students. In return, students generally use this time to not pay attention to their professors and take advantage of the extra five days they have to put off the actual work.
But silly week can serve a bigger purpose to students than many of them realize. The first week is an opportunity for students to decide which courses are actually worth their time and energy.
Erin Bamer
The deadline to drop a course without adding a “W” to a student”s record is always ridiculously close to the first day of classes. This year, the deadline is next Friday for full-term courses, less than two weeks after the start of term.
With such a short deadline, students aren”t given much time to come to a conclusion about the classes they”re enrolled in. But students ought to take advantage of these two weeks to consider if one or more of their classes are important enough for them to see through to the end of the semester.
Dropping a course should never be seen as “giving up.” For one thing, most students have legitimate reasons for dropping a class. Also, giving students grief for “quitting” doesn”t achieve anything. All it does is make them feel bad.
There is no specific list of acceptable reasons for dropping a course. A student shouldn”t hesitate to drop a class if they”re uncomfortable with it. It could be because they know they won”t get a good grade, or because they feel like they won”t get anything out of the curriculum they”ll be taught. All of these are legitimate reasons for a student to leave a class.
I have only dropped one class during my college career so far – accounting. I stuck it out for over a month, but I was miserable and knew I was already going to drop my business major so the course wouldn”t help me in the end. I had an “A” in the class when I dropped, but I knew that wouldn”t last.
If anything, I regret not dropping my accounting class sooner. In hindsight, it sucks that I worked so hard for a month only to realize that the work I was doing wasn”t worth my time. Once I finally dropped it, I was much happier and the rest of my semester went a lot smoother.
Professors usually encourage their students to drop courses too. While they want their students to enjoy themselves and learn from what they teach, most professors – the good ones at least – tell students to drop a course if they feel it would result in a poor grade on their record.
Some students are ahead of the game already. They stuff their schedule full of 18, 20 even 22 credits worth of classes, then they go to all of them during silly week and choose the one or two classes they dislike the most. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, give it a go for future semesters.
The bottom line is that dropping a class isn”t something to feel ashamed of. It certainly is a serious decision to make, but students should never delay doing it if they”re really sure they won”t gain anything out of a course by the end of the semester.
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer