Is it only the beginning of October and freshmen already have to start thinking about what they want to do with the next semester of their lives? Most are still adjusting to being able to control their own social time, and are probably not prepared for this kind of power.

In between midterm stress, trying to stay on top of classes, looking forward to finals and trying to have some resemblance of a normal social life, students have to find time to sit down and plan the rest of their year. At AARO we were handed a course book thicker than a dictionary of classes we can take and are required to take. So sometime in the next month we have to sit down and plan our weeks and classes.

Something I have noticed this semester, is if you do not respect or get along with your professors, your semester is, quite frankly, going to be horrible.

So I have decided to take my scheduling a different route: find as many upperclassmen as I can, ask them which professors they enjoyed the most, and which they learned the most from.

One of my professors this year told me that a student doesn’t take a class he takes a professor. Golden advice that immediately stuck in my brain. There might be two sections of a course offered, but if the teachers have completely different methods, the classes will be completely different as well. Maybe courses should come with teacher biographies, as well as class descriptions.

But freshmen get saddled with a whole different dilemma. We are the bottom of the barrel. We get almost the last choice of classes. So after putting the time and energy into creating this schedule that fits each individual student perfectly, the classes we choose will probably already be full, and in our miniscule time slot to create a semester we will have to hurriedly change our minds and re-choose classes.

Not that freshmen should complain. We are the youngest and the lower class, but I personally don’t see the point of choosing a schedule when the rest of the school chooses its ahead of us.

Also, many people will have the urge to immediately take classes geared toward the majors they think they want right now. Most of us have met upperclassmen that have changed our minds once or twice before finally deciding on the major they wanted before declaring. So why not give yourself a little more time to decide? Take your rhetoric, a perspective and a general education course, and one or two others. You could decide next semester that you will never be a doctor and want to give it all up to be a writer, then all those extra chemistry classes won’t seem like such a good idea.

Also don’t be too courageous with how many hours you are take. Yes, 18 may sound cool and no one will say you are not brave. But if you’re struggling with the 15 or 16 you are taking this semester, the next one is not going to be a miracle where you can now handle 18 hours of class. College is a marathon not a sprint, make sure you allow yourself time to get involved and have fun next semester without running yourself into the ground from exhaustion the second week.

But, looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, there are those here who can help give friendly advice. Your advisor can assist you in the final fine-tuning of your schedule, before your access appointment time. Find upper classmen and ask their opinions of teachers. You have your ARA, academic resident advisor, who lives in your hall and whose primary goal is to assist you academically, and they are violently underused.

So not to add anymore stress to your daily lives, but if you haven’t started thinking yet, grab some coffee, your course book and a pencil with a big eraser and start planning out the second semester of your year. Good luck with that!

Rachel Carey is a first-year journalism major. She can be reached at [email protected].