| OCR Text |
Show Ask the computer if it cares Apotheosis Once upon a time, a student registering for classes had very little trouble registering for classes outside his major field of study. Whether the student was actually registered for those classes by the capricious computer is another woeful tale, and is something which will not be discussed in this particular column., Increasingly, however, as each deadline for turning in pre-regis-tration cards looms before the typical student, the question becomes be-comes not one of "which class interests me enough that I would want to take it," but one of "What class, if any, is scheduled for 8:50?" or, "I need to find a two-hour class somewhere that's taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays." Thurs-days." Once the typical student has chosen the courses he knows he'll have to take eventually anyway, he often finds, much to his dismay, dis-may, that the total number oi" hours he has selected thus far amounts to 10 hours. While some students consider this number a fairly formidable study load (especially (es-pecially if the student is a science or engineering major), many students stu-dents feel more comfortable with a 15 to 16 hour load. And so the frantic searching begins. What generally happens is that the student starts with the class schedule in hand and begins the long tedious task of going from the accounting classes through the Turkish language classes to find the elusive five or six hours he thinks he needs for a well-rounded schedule. What occurs after the initial trauma can only be described de-scribed as a case study in frustration frustra-tion and agony. The student may end up taking classes continuously from 7:45 a.m. until 3:05 p.m., with a one hour break at 12:05 every Monday, Mon-day, Wednesday and Friday, and only one class every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Such a schedule, sche-dule, while seemingly very unbalanced, unbal-anced, does have one redeeming factor: with only one class on Tuesday and Thursday, the student stu-dent can recuperate from all the running around he must do to get to his classes every Monday, Wednesday Wed-nesday and Friday. Conflicts in the classes a student stu-dent wants to take and the ones he finally ends up taking because no other classes would fit into his overall schedule, could produce some interesting interdepartmental interdepart-mental majors. For instance, how about the pre-med student who took a ballet class out of frustration frustra-tion in finding nothing else to take .... and who ended up becoming a doctor who specialized special-ized in the orthopedic disorders of ballet dancers? Or the chemistry student who took so many political politi-cal science classes that he is seriously ser-iously thinking of doing a thesis on "The Chemical Analysis of the Great American Political System"? Sys-tem"? Are such seemingly impossible occurrences to become as commonplace com-monplace in the future as the typical frustrated departmental majors of today? |
