One of the more fateful weeks in a college semester is upon us - registration week. As I was trying to consider how I wanted to spend my last academic semester, I began looking for advice in many forms, the only relevant one being a viewing of Animal House. I think we can all agree this movie has dispensed some superb college guidelines over the years, but the one scene that stuck out to me was when Dean Wormer is reading through the abominable GPAs of the Delta pledge class. The lowest of the low, of course, is Bluto Blutarsky, with a 0.0 GPA. His reaction to this, of course, involves sticking two pencils up his nose. What a film.
Anyway, while I am not aiming for a Blutarsky-like senior year, I am facing a class-related dilemma. The other day I discovered, to my great surprise, that I have in fact fulfilled my philosophy core and do not have to be the only second-semester senior still enrolled in Philosophy of the Person. This left me with only four courses I needed to take, and also with a choice; should I be the good student who takes full advantage of his 40,000 dollar-plus education and take a full course load, or should I consider my "college experience" as a whole and keep the relaxed four-class load as many seniors do?
But the term "college experience" could not be any more vague. In fact, I'm convinced it was simply created as an excuse for college students to justify anything they do. Skip class after staying up too late talking to your new hallmates freshman year? Yes, that is actually part of the college experience. Smoke a victory cigar after a football win? Sure, I suppose many college students have experienced that. Get drunk and wake up next to your TA an hour before your exam? Yeah, that's one kind of experience at least …
My immediate reaction was that it would be a total waste to take only four classes. With a double concentration in CSOM and a minor in Arts & Sciences, I have no shortage of classes and departments that I am interested in. Time and time again I have found myself saying how there are so many classes at BC - in economics, theology, finance, art - that I won't have time to take. Now I have the chance for one last class. Just do it already and quit whining. Right?
But then I thought more. Yes, it's true that I am interested in many things. On the other hand, how many times have I been told that you work the rest of your life, but college is over in four years and you'll always want to go back? Once you graduate, the chances to hang out with friends and live the college lifestyle are few and far between. I realized this as I considered a finance elective that meets every Tuesday from 7-9:30 p.m. Tuesday isn't Saturday by any stretch, but at the same time, isn't the beauty of being a second semester senior that any day can be Saturday? Let's be honest: yes, I am interested in a lot of courses, but do I really want to be sitting in Hedge Funds on a Tuesday at 9 p.m., saying to myself, "Your friends are all having fun, and you are voluntarily in class." Who does that?
The question comes down to what I consider to be the college experience. Taking one extra class is not going to kill my social life by any means, but at the same time, it probably isn't going to shoot my intellectual knowledge into the stratosphere either. I have friends who have taken six classes for more than half of their semesters here, and I have others who scour PEPs for the easiest teachers they can find. There are no shortage of choices in terms of what kind of last semester I'll have. But the fact is whichever kind of semester I choose, it's the last one. And it will be my lasting memory of college. So it will need to be a good one - a really good one.
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