Registration roulette
Hell hath no fury like summer session rejecting me
BEN POGGEMILLER STAFF
Summer session is a fickle mistress. She can benefit you greatly — but only if you can tame her destructive power. The only way to do this, sadly, is through sheer luck.
Last semester I had a startling revelation in class: I hate computer science. I liked the logic involved and the discipline of the subject, but when it came to the nuts and bolts of it, computer science was just plain boring to me. Algorithms were interesting, but creating a program that lets you cheat at Sudoku was not. In other words, I would rather be instantaneously transported to any random position in the universe than become a programmer.
When it came time for me to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I drew a blank; I prefer watching television to making life decisions like that. Then it dawned on me: television! Television has given me entertainment, has cheered me up when I felt blue, and has inspired me with countless stories of ragtag teams of misfits overcoming all odds to win some sort of championship, causing even the most cantankerous enemy to break the silence by slowly clapping while everyone else gradually starts participating in a heart-warming ovation. Unfortunately, television also has a nasty habit of distracting me from more productive endeavors, such as school. In fact, for my whole life, schoolwork has been just an obstacle in the way of TV time. Then I had an epiphany. What if television was a productive endeavor? That way, anything TV-related that I do will be positive, and not a debilitating addiction. It was last semester that I decided I wanted to be a TV writer.
Television writers are great. They make a lot of money to have fun, write it down, and allow others to have fun watching it. They also have a chance to be staggeringly clever. For example, from the 1960s bad-on-purpose Batman show:
Barbara: “I didn’t know you were a student of the classics.”
Robin: “Batman teaches me a little poetry in between remanding criminals to jail.”
Batman: “Enough prose and cons, Robin.”
I researched what it takes to be a television writer, and the only qualification that I came across was to be very, very good at it. Aside from the basic screenwriting technique, I would need a mastery of the English language, which, in a shocking turn of events, led me to decide that I needed a degree in English. Of course, the school year was half over, and I needed six credit hours of English to be on my merry way to that degree. The only way to not let my first year and a half of school to be a total waste was to take representative literary works in lady summer session, for the months of May and June.
This was easier said than done, however. My registration date for summer session was Tuesday, March 27, but due to being sick on the weekend and having a paper due on the same Tuesday (and not discounting being a total moron), I forgot to register. To my horror, the class became completely full.
At this juncture, I had three options:
1. Take an equivalent class every Monday and Wednesday night from May until August. No thanks.
2. Go to the arts office and beg for mercy.
3. Take it on the chin and waste a year of my life taking one prerequisite.
Option two seemed the most appealing to me, so I went to the arts office. They told me, after a half an hour wait, that I would have to go the English department and beg them for mercy first. When I got to the English department, I wandered around until someone asked me what I wanted. I told them my sob story and they told me that the professor was absolutely not letting anyone else in, since we couldn’t have students hanging from the rafters, two students to a chair, riots for bread everyday kind of situation.
My last hope was to keep randomly checking Aurora all day hoping that someone would drop. So I drank beer all afternoon in the Manitoban office (I felt I deserved it) and hit refresh every once in a while until eventually the “remaining” field changed from zero to one. I could hardly believe it. Hands shaking, I scrambled to snag that last spot. Sure enough, I was in.
It wasn’t because I did the right thing, took the initiative, or received mercy from anyone. I got into representative literary works because I drank beer and clicked the mouse all afternoon. Summer session classes are way too small and inflexible, but great for those who get in. She certainly has her “prose and cons.”
