It’s been relatively quiet around here lately; the both of us have started a new semester, and there’s the usual mess of selecting subjects and finding our way around our respective campuses. Mine is bigger, and therefore harder to navigate, and therefore I have more reason for my lateness in posting something new. :P But most of all, it’s the subjects and studying that is making me so, very, busy. Being in my final semester under the Arts degree, I have to make sure I select the right subjects to graduate. But at the same time, I can’t overload myself, either on the classes, or the readings/out-of-class work, or the exams/essays.

When picking subjects, these are the rules I generally follow:

1) I’ll enjoy studying this subject. The topics sound good. How do I know this? I’ve read what brief information there is on the university website (e.g, on a course profile or a faculty page), or I’ve done some really basic reading on the subject (e.g, handy Google, Wikipedia searches), or I’ve talked to someone else who’s done the subject, and they told me what they studied.

2) The lecturer’s pretty capable. Or he/she totally rocks. This is a little harder to find out: if you’re in your first semester, you’re probably best off ignoring this rule, or asking your seniors, if you know them. But if you’ve been around a while, you’re likely to know more of the lecturers and hear more feedback from fellow students. Trust me on this: a bad lecturer, whether he/she be boring, rambling, a slow speaker, a heavily accented speaker, a too-fast speaker, a nose-in-book type, a face-to-blackboard type, etc, can utterly screw up your learning experience.

3) It fits okay in my timetable. There aren’t any timetable clashes that absolutely cannot be resolved; if there are, I’ve checked with my faculty officers/counsellors and they’ve found a way for me to bypass the problem. The classes are all during hours I’m quite satisfied with, or at least, I can tolerate them. Personally, I made sure I had no classes before 10am each day, since it takes me 1.5 hours to travel to uni, and I’d probably have to set my alarm clock at some absurd hour to get to an 8am class. I did have an 8am exam once, but it wasn’t too bad, because the procrastinator in me was awake all night studying anyway.

Also, watch out for really long days with back-to-back classes. I’d advise against doing this unless you really can’t help it, or if you’re sure you can handle it. Depending on your subjects and how intense the lectures may be, you might find yourself utterly drained of energy before classes end.

4) The assessment tasks won’t kill me. Meaning I’ve compared the assessment schedule for this subject with my other subjects, and I won’t be having major 2.5k word essays worth 80% of my total mark due in the exam period when I’m also going to be having 80% weightage exams. Preferably, my assessment is spread out during the term, and I’m seeing small percentage weightings for each of them – a 30%, 20% 40%, and a 10%, for example. I screw up in exams, so I’ve chosen a subject where the final exam is only worth 30% (also for example. I know some of you crazy kids actually prefer exams to essays. :P ).

5) If there’s a lot of take-home work, it’s not more than I can handle comfortably. For example, in Literature, we read about 6-9 books per subject, so four literature subjects would average at about 30 books. Some of these are massive, like the 1000+ page Dickens’s Bleak House… hence I’ve never taken four lit subjects at once. I’ve spread my electives out as much as I could, and taken the lighter-reading literature subjects that also fulfilled criteria #1: Interest and enjoyment. This semester I’m doing Creative Writing: Poetics as an alternative to that fourth lit subject, so instead of reading an extra load of literature texts, I write haiku and sonnets.

6) It counts toward my major/degree. Well, it can be an elective/contrasting subject, in which case replace this criterium with It’s useful in some personal way to me. Basically, don’t do a subject you feel will never have an effect on your future life.

7) I’ve sat in on a few classes before, and liked what I’ve seen. This, despite how much it sounds like gate-crashing, is actually the best way to figure out if the subject is for you, or not. In the first week uni, there’ll likely only be lectures, and first lectures are usually overviews of the subject plus summaries of assessment, criteria, etc. Sit in on these. They help wonders.

Of course, how much control you have over selecting your subject varies from course to course, uni to uni. The University of Queensland’s English Literature degree recently got revamped, and I had to spend some time making sure I could still follow the old syllabus and not the new one, because the new one was not being friendly to my predicted graduation date. But at the same time, I still had these compulsory subjects I absolutely had to take. So I made sure I knew what my compulsory subjects were, early on, so I could schedule in which year and which semester I’d have to take them – especially when my compulsory subjects were sometimes dropped from the “currently available” subjects list for a semester. (Always do your homework and know what you’ve got to take, so you can apply early for any amendments to your enrolment/graduation if you need any.)

Eh, that’s all I can think of regarding subjects for today. It’s 2.30am, and sleep calls! Let me know if I’ve missed anything you think I really ought to add.

Edit: Pay your fees on time. That’s a useful tip, I’ll bet! :P I almost forgot to pay my fees today, and it’s the last day for payment before they start throwing penalties at you.