EDITORIAL: School days, school daze

As the first week of theAs the first week of thesemester winds down, thinkAs the first week of thesemester winds down, thinkabout what's on yourAs the first week of thesemester winds down, thinkabout what's on yourschedule - and why.As the first week of thesemester winds down, thinkabout what's on yourschedule - and why.__________________________ But during the week, from Monday through Friday, your daily routine will remain relatively fixed, pivoting around lectures and seminars and labs or recitations. With a week remaining in the Add period, are you making a semester-long commitment to a survey course in history where you only interact with the TA, an economics lecture where the professor's native language is not English, an art history seminar on some painters you couldn't care less about and a foreign language class that is supposed to make you proficient, but only succeeds in getting you frustrated? The two-week shopping period at the start of each semester is undoubtedly one of the most stressful times of the academic year. Professors don't know how many students will take their courses, leading to overcrowded or cancelled recitations. After waiting in line for an hour, you inevitably find out that the bulkpack or textbook you need for your class the next day is out of stock. And if you're trying to balance more than four classes, in hopes of having an epiphany about which ones will actually be worthwhile, you end up doing twice as much work -- just in case you keep them all. There must be a better way to choose your schedule than attending five or six or eight classes for a week or two -- and we don't mean sitting down with an old copy of the Penn Course Review and looking at professors' average ratings, then seeing who's teaching after noon. As students, we're as guilty of following this procedure as any Penn undergraduates. But ask yourself: Have you chosen your classes simply because you need to fulfill general and major requirements, want to pad your transcript with courses whose titles sound impressive (but in truth are guts), or feel you must have expertise in certain areas to be employable when you graduate? Or -- and this is rare here, thanks to the bureaucratic maze of requirements and the hyperconcern over GPAs -- are you in classes where the material excites you and makes you wonder what else is out there, waiting to be discovered? Are you sitting in a seminar or lecture because you are genuinely interested in the topics it will tackle, and believe you'll be a better-educated person when you've written that last word in your blue book in May? Every semester you spend here is unique; lectures, papers, projects and exams are one-shot deals that cannot be repeated if you screw up on the first try. All too often, we students make academic decisions lightly, and find out too late that our preoccupation with performance has displaced learning as the focus of our college careers.