Cracking the AUBG code

This past week I was let on many great secrets. If I had a diary, it probably would've started ink-bleeding from all the mysteries of life I would've shared with it. And then it would've spontaneously set itself ablaze.

One of the greatest secrets, however, was that poetry and fiction are the same. Give it up, guys, you are not poets or novelists according to AUBG's Liberal arts policy. Your activities "overlap." Imagine now, I am no psychic but I can guess easily what you're thinking: "This must be wrong..." Nope. I mean, yes, this MUST be wrong. Now imagine my utter stupefaction when I found this out on Thursday afternoon." Yeeeey! Add/drop will be over in a day, I started thinking, "and most courses are already full, and maybe, just maybe, my level of tolerance towards statements on the lines of "Well, why don't you find another 4-credit course?" is pretty low..." I thought of how, being a JMC major, I was superlucky that News Reporting and Feature Writing did not classify as one and the same thing, too.

And it was then when I started having the wildest of all wild dreams. "I had a dream." Literary. And in my dream the add/drop week was extended to two weeks. Which seemed like a very realistic idea, considering that Harvard has an add/drop month, NYU - three weeks, and UMass goes with two weeks. And in my dream there were many sections of one course when the waiting list added up to more people than the number of such who were already enrolled. And in my dream I didn't have to put on my sad face or my begging face, I didn't have to camp out the Dean's office (although that is kind of fun). And Professor Staff... well, I did say I had a dream, not a nightmare, so he was nowhere to be seen.

I most certainly don't understand this system. I just don't get the Balkan Liberal arts. I am, supposedly, offered the chance to make my own schedule. But at the same time, I'm not. Cause I either can't get into the courses I want and I am redirected to taking something else (f.e. Calculus instead of Art History, or something), or I am being sent over to other professors to "deal" with me. So the whole process of adding and dropping courses turns out to be a bad cross-breed between a Turkish market and a high school timetable, where we would be given the schedule and we could choose whether we would like to do three more classes of French or Literature. In the end, after being dragged over hot coals, I feel like Santa cheated on me and gave me someone else's present. I have the constant guilt that I have taken someone else's place in some yucky course I didn't even imagine myself being enrolled in.

So I suggest we get an add/drop post board. We can leave each other messages and trade spots in courses. For example, "Poetry for Linear," And we would most certainly be cracking the AUBG code then.

Dream on.
-S.