On Junior Year

Or "Why Does My Ideal Schedule Look Like A Space Invader?"

I thought I'd take a page out of Larkin's blogging book and go with the Rocky and Bullwinkle-Style double-title. Let me just cut right to the chase. This is what my ideal schedule looks like for Fall semester of my Junior year :

I've been suspicious of the shape of my schedule since my very first semester, when it looked vaguely like some kind of handgun.

Second semester was a bit of a stretch, but I always thought it looked like the blood-spattered teeth of an infernal beast.

Third semester takes a little imagination, but it's vivid. Imagine you are me, and that you are shown to a room. The person who has shown you there opens the door and says "Here is where you will be working for the next four months" before leaving. You walk into the room and the first thing you notice is a little lump of feces in the middle of the floor. While you are looking at this lump, more feces lands on it. You look up to find an improbably massive mountain of dung suspended from the ceiling by some unknown force. I cannot express to you how much this resembled my Fall semester, the feeling that I was laboring under an upside-down stack of shit that could cease adherence at any moment and crush my efforts under crap.

This semester doesn't look like anything, aside from pain. I wake up, go to class with either two 30 minute breaks or no breaks at all, and then go back to the Suite. There's a reason that nobody ever looks for shapes in thunderstorm clouds; you don't need an imagination to know it's going to suck.

But next semester, Fall semester Junior year.... I'm a little miffed by the way the schedule turned out. Here I thought that after two years of having of 50% of my schedule dictated by requirements and prerequisites, I might finally get to choose (albeit from within my major) classes which are specifically appealing to me. It appears that I anticipated my liberation one semester too soon:

I plan to take : Argumentation, which will fulfill my required "Writing Intensive" credits and assist with my Writing Minor.
Language And Gender because it's one of the only Social Differentiation classes that fits within my PNP Major.
History Of World Cinema because a film history course should prove an easier Cultural Diversity option than a lit class.
Experimental Psychology because PNP/Psych Majors aren't allowed to study abroad until they've taken it.
Philosophy Of Mind and Cognitive Psychology are the only two classes I had a reasonable amount of choice over. I'm bummed because POM coincides exactly with 20th Century Russian History, which I was going to take to complete my Language and Arts cluster.

An additional concern is this : if it takes me five semesters to get through all the red-tape and bullshit, and I decide to go abroad my sixth semester, then will I spend my Senior year fulfilling Major requirements? Will I even be able to finish my major?

It's something I have to look into, but not right now.

-Alan