Though classes have officially started again, most people’s schedules are far from thoroughly definite. As students get better acquainted with their class times and just how much time each of their classes will take up, it becomes easier to start planning things like jobs, extracurricular activities and time to be spent with friends.

However, even the classes that you take can still be pretty up in the air. The deadline to add and drop classes is this Friday, which means that you can still swap out classes that you feel like you might be interested in without penalty through the end of the week.

The add drop period at the beginning of the semester can certainly be a mixed blessing sometimes. On one hand, for some students who were put on a waitlist to get into a class it can be a saving grace as it’s often the last possible time that space within a class will open. Moreover, for some people who didn’t get as much of a chance to plan out their schedule as thoroughly as they might have liked, being able to drop or swap out some classes that might be completely different than what you’d originally expected can be helpful so that you don’t end up stuck in a class for an entire semester that you might not enjoy or that might not be relevant to your major.

However, the add/drop deadline system can sometimes present problems too. All too often I know I’ve been in classes where the number of students present halved between the first and second lecture of the semester. Of course a good amount of people have legitimate reasons for dropping a class, but there are plenty of other excuses too.

“The professor scared me with the syllabus,” “I didn’t know there were going to be this many tests,” or “Everyone who told me this was going to be an easy A lied” are just a few of the excuses I’ve heard for giving up on a class within the first week of school.

I’m certainly not one to dictate your schedule for you, and ultimately the onus falls upon the individual to decide if a class isn’t right for them, but I do think that a person really ought to exercise caution when considering dropping a class so quickly. It’s your college experience and I do think that you ought to pick classes that will be rewarding as well as relevant towards your major. That being said, I really think that people who drop a class because they think it’s going to be difficult are often doing themselves a disservice. This is college; if your classes aren’t difficult or challenging in some way then you’re probably wasting your own time.

All too often we view our classes as some sort of obstacle standing in the way of us graduating. If we know that it’s going to be especially difficult to get an A in a class, we’re far more likely to get out while we still can. However, you can’t measure the success of an experience with numbers or letter marks. I recently took a class in which I received an A minus, tarnishing my 4.0 average up to this point in my academic career. However, I consider that particular class to be one of the most valuable learning experiences I’ve had so far.

It definitely is difficult sometimes to come up with a satisfactory schedule, but how tough one expects a class to be shouldn’t be the only factor that deters us from taking a class. With great challenge comes great reward, and you might find that putting in that extra bit of effort can make all the difference down the road.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits the Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].