As a college student, you will be required to take a number of courses each semester. Most of the time, these courses with enforce either your major or your minor and will push you closer and closer to graduation. However, choosing your college courses can be tricky – you can very easily choose the wrong class and be stuck with it all semester long. Of course, you could drop a class, but it may reflect poorly on your GPA if you do.
This is exactly why you want to do your due diligence. You want to make sure that you are choosing the right courses – based on your interests, the quality of the professor and whether you need the class in the first place. The last thing you want is to take a course you don’t need, because you could waste a lot of time. Here are five helpful tips for choosing your college classes.
- Ask Other Students About the Professor
One way to choose the right courses is to ask other students about the class and the professor. There is a good chance that you have friends or acquaintances that have taken the same course and can tell you a great deal about it.
- Find Out How Much Homework is Assigned
If you are already up to your neck in homework and you already know that some of your new classes will require a lot of homework, you may want to find a class that doesn’t have a lot of take-home work. Of course, other students can tell you how much homework there generally is, but you can also find online syllabi that can give you a hint as to how much work you will be doing in the class. If you are going to University of Maryland, or another college, you can usually find this information on the website – just log in with your student ID and name.
- Use Online Rating Profiles
If you can’t find another student to tell you about a particular course, you may want to find an online rating profile. This is a hub where many students, mostly anonymous, post ratings of a certain college course and its professor. This can give you a really great idea as to whether the course will be fun, interesting or if the professor will be boring and old fashion.
- Talk to the Professor Yourself
If you still aren’t sure, you may want to go straight to the source. Many professors are willing to talk to students interested in taking their courses. All you have to do is ask a professor when his or her office hours are and then you can make an appointment. Some professors are very busy, so this is a good chance to get some one on one time.
- Find Out if the Course Fits into Your Major
On top of everything, you want to find out if the college course fits into your major. Ideally, a course should give you the proper amount of credits you need to graduate with your degree. In the end, if a college course isn’t giving you credits, you certainly want to move on and find a course that does.