One of the best parts of college life is getting to craft your own schedule. Hate getting up in the morning? Take later classes! Want to have more time for yourself at the end of the day? Take morning classes! Having a mid-life crisis? Try the college experience! That is, unless you are a Drexel University freshman deprived of your autonomy to choose your own schedule.
In my first quarter, I started my days with an early 9:30 a.m. lecture (or 8 a.m. on exam days which was every other week). On my worst day, I ended at 9 p.m. with a chemistry lab. In between, I had big enough gaps in my schedule to take a leisurely lunch but not large enough to do anything terribly productive. Some of these, like my biology lecture or common exam period that had a single section, would have been inevitable. Other classes, such as my first-section-of-the-day biology lab, could definitely have been optimized to let me sleep in or sleep early. It is time to stop treating freshmen like children and let them experiment with a class schedule that works for them.
As minor of an issue this may be, it is still a paternalistic and infantilizing practice for academic advisors to schedule classes for freshmen, and just because it is minor does not mean that it should be ignored. Incoming freshmen are fully capable of making decisions on when they want to take certain classes based on individual preferences. They are, after all, adults or at least becoming adults. A system where a competent decision-maker is unable to make a decision is paternalistic.
Even if they do not fully know what sort of “college schedule” is best, incoming freshmen are aware of certain preferences, such as a disdain for waking up early, that deserve to be respected. Whatever schedule they create cannot be worse than the schedule the academic advisor came up with because the advisor will only seek to place students into classes they need, not optimize their schedule for the best section times. And even if the advisor were to put such thought into each of their students, a student-created schedule is much more bearable because it becomes a matter of dealing with the consequences of individual actions rather than living with the choices made by an advisor who has hundreds of other students.
There is no reason why such a student-driven system cannot be implemented. It does not take a Univ 101 class to figure out how to use the course registration system. BannerWeb is a simple enough system to learn. With a quick guide, students will easily learn how to use the course registration features of BannerWeb. There is also no reason why students will be too lost to know what courses to take. Most majors have a sample plan of study, and if they do not, they should. Students who may need to have a different schedule due to transfer or AP/IB credits can still reach out to their advisor. Just because students can register themselves does not mean they need to be left to fend for themselves. For extra clarification, advisors can email students with the courses they need to register for.
In addition, giving students the freedom to register themselves, particularly in the vulnerable time of college transition, improves an important aspect of the first term: making friends. If someone is coming to Drexel with friends from high school, or perhaps is friends with someone already at Drexel, they can plan their schedules to have overlapping class times, and consequently, overlapping free times! They can even take the same classes if they are in the same major.
Already knowing someone and maintaining that friendship is not a detriment to developing a college social circle. That is a false dichotomy. There is no reason why going to college necessitates cutting off high school friends. Having this early friendship reduces feelings of loneliness, the urge to spend all day video calling old friends and might even serve as a scaffold to start a larger friend group.
These consequences become worse as we switch to a semester system. Instead of being stuck with a schedule they did not create for a quarter, freshmen will now endure the schedule for an entire semester. And in the case that the timing of a certain course was detrimental enough to affect their grade, freshmen will have fewer opportunities to improve their GPA due to there being less terms to average grades out.
It is probably too late to fix this broken system this year, but another batch of freshman schedule tragedies should remind us to start working on a solution for next year and beyond.