Dear Dr. Monday,
I’m a freshman whose first unguided bookbagging is coming up soon! I’m excited to finally pick my own classes, but I’m lost in a sea of about 40 Chrome tabs trying to figure out all the different requirements! I was hoping you could explain all this stuff to me, because I don’t want to pick wrong and get stuck in classes I hate!
Thanks,
Begging to Bag
Dear Naive Idiot,
Planning your time at Duke can be a difficult thing to do—whether it’s figuring out which shade of salmon colored shorts best match your Vineyard Vines tee or deciding if DukeEngage Peru or DukeEngage Columbia is more fulfilling experience, there’s already enough to deal with without having to plan your academic future out through a system that thinks adding a “back” button is a major upgrade.
Lucky for you, there’s already help right around the corner. Duke has mandated that you meet with your advisor, a member of a crack team of professors/Link technicians/janitors who had some free time dedicated to helping answer your tough questions about being able to graduate. Whether you’re wondering what order you should take classes in or maybe who the easiest professor is for a certain course, you’ve got 15 minutes—so use ‘em wisely. Personally, I try to ask as many questions as possible, since he really seems to enjoy each “Your Director for Undergraduate Studies is really the best person to ask about that.” Then, we spend our last 5 minutes listening to each other breathe heavily while he hunts through ACES looking for the “Eligible to Enroll” box. With about 30 seconds to go, he angrily asks me if I know where the stupid box is, as if I were the deaf, blind and actively-being-waterboarded man who designed ACES. I then leave, filled for the next six months with the hopefulness of knowing that even if I fail all my classes, I’ll still be qualified to work as an academic advisor for Pratt.
“But Dr. Monday,” I can already hear you whining. “I’m from Westchester. My parents told me they loved me and paid someone to pick out my classes for me. Life isn’t fair!” Well, as any good therapist will tell you, I care as long as you keep paying me—so here’s my take on bookbag-ology.
Let’s start off on a good note, by getting those notorious Trinity requirements out of the way. You know, T-Reqs, T-Wrecking-My-Gpa, T-This-Painting-Class-Is-Costing-Me-Six-Grand—whatever you call them, they look like a system your drunk great-grandfather created while yelling at your mother about how she wasn’t raising you properly. MARTHA, HAVE YOU NOT BEEN TEACHING LITTLE BILLY ABOUT THE CIVILIZATIONS? HOW CAN HE GROW UP PROPER WITHOUT THE CIVILIZATIONS, MARTHA? IF I FIND OUT THE BOY ISN’T GETTING HIS ETHICAL INQUIRIES, I WILL WRITE YOU STRAIGHT OUT OF THE WILL.
But unlike your grandpa, who can be placated by slipping a little Nyquil into his Ensure, the T-Req system at Duke shares its tenacity for killing you with the dinosaur of the same name. There is an argument that a liberal arts education is a valuable asset, but that fades in today’s society where the primary purpose of a college degree is to get a job and be employable. This isn’t a cheese plate at the Nasher Cafe, it’s a business, where students pay money to become qualified to do something for the rest of their lives. A few requirements for certain core subjects makes sense. Take writing, for example—you should be able to write to graduate, unless you’re an enginerd, since their thoughts are basically spaghetti of slanted lines. But forcing me to try classes in random areas in the hope that I’ll stumble upon one I like didn’t work with vegetables when I was 4-year-old and won’t work now.
And you Pratt-Stars don’t get off easy either—remember when you came to Duke, just waiting to get to a course where you could stick those grubby, Lego-toned hands into actually building something? They’re called Senior Design Electives, and they exist so that a younger version of you will think that you’ll leave Duke actually qualified to build something, which will inevitably lead to your dream of flying spaceships to outer space. In actuality, older-you will have scrapped the visions of working for NASA for visions of trying more drugs with your friends before you all graduate and forget each other exist, and that project just became another obstacle to pass before you can collect your diploma.
But, whatever difficulties may lie in the coursework ahead, we’re Duke students because we can take them. So buckle down, kids, head over to Schedulator and get to building your lives for next semester. There’s nothing like a little bookbagging to remind you that, whatever your academic struggles, they’ll all be over by the start of next semester and will all be back two weeks later.
Dr. Monday would like to advise Larry Moneta that there is no need to send an email expressing condolences for the T-Req system, though it would be nice to get one for how much rain we’ve had lately.
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