I have something embarrassing to say, so I’m just going to come right out with it. I love shopping for courses. At Brown, I have the luxury of spending almost two weeks just floating from lecture to lecture, adding or deleting courses from my cart, and daydreaming about the genius I’ll be after I take all these classes. And that’s just Shopping Period. The moment they release the course offerings for next semester I’m on Banner getting back into the frenzy of adding 5 Neuroscience, 4 English, and 3 Modern Culture and Media courses into my cart (plus a slew of others). This means I spend the majority of every semester dreaming about the next one. I could get into what this means about my inability to ever “live in the moment,” but we’ll save that soliloquy for the writers of Thought Catalog and leave it there (yes, that was supposed to be a burn). Long story short, I really get off on Shopping Period.
This infatuation (obsession) of mine lends itself to what I can only call “nerd problems.” If you even clicked on this article, then I’m going to assume that you’re a nerd, too, and that you sympathize with the following plights. If you don’t consider yourself a nerd, then you should probably re-evaluate your assumptions about your identity.
As you can probably tell by the first draft of my schedule–
-I need help. My Shopping Period is going to be hell, for one because I’m going to be sprinting around campus for a week and half. At least I know I have a few compatriots whose schedules mirror mine. The frenzied-running-from-place-to-place is so common at Brown that I thought “overcommitment” might actually be a word in the English language. It’s not. The real issue with a schedule like this is not just how unrealistic it is, but how much it bothers me that I really can’t do it all. Do I want to take a gender studies course in feminism and abstract art? Hell yes. Do I want to master vector multiplication? Sure. Do I want to spend time writing satire for a grade? Sign me up. Will I have time to really do any of these things? No way in hell.
Which brings me to the central nerd problem, one that I struggle with every semester. I wish I were better at math. I wish I understood physics. Some people dream of fame and fortune, I dream of a PhD in computational cognitive neuroscience. While at Brown, I’ve played with the idea of taking hardcore classes, like organic chemistry, just for the challenge. But I’ve also always shied away from it. Linear Algebra was too overwhelming in the first lecture, and Introductory Physics was at 8:30 in the morning (no thank you). When I came to Brown, I thought I wanted to be an English major. Now that I’ve committed to studying science, I feel like I’ve already missed out on a ton of things that interest me. I want to take a computer science class, but I fear I’m too late to begin coding. I want to enroll in Applied Math 0160, but the Critical Review said it was hard. I want to understand other things, too, like theories on gender and sexuality, but what if everyone else in the class is ridiculously well read and I know nothing? How will I ever understand the world around me if I’m too afraid to take difficult classes? Why am I afraid of these classes at all? Who am I? Are we getting into Thought Catalog territory?
Moving away from my existential panic attack – let’s just chalk it up to being a woman in science and all the inferiority complexes that come with it – there are countless other problems to deal with during the first weeks of school. If you’re simultaneously anxious and a compulsive shopper – if you don’t know what I mean by this, you have not been reading this article – then you have to deal with the soul-crushing concept of stepping out of one class early to shop another class. Because I worry so much about hurting professors’ feelings, I get stuck budgeting my time until I leave the classroom.
“At 10:35 I will slowly put my notebooks in my backpack. At 10:40 I will close my backpack. At 10:45 I will stand and make my way to the door.” I mean, should I see a psychoanalyst, or is this normal behavior? Does anyone else go through this shit? Plus my exit is never as graceful as I hope it will be, so I should probably just give up and live in an igloo.
And that’s not even to mention having to decide between two courses that you really like. This one has a genius professor, but it’s at 9 am all the way across campus. This one is a little later, 11 am, but that awful guy from my first year seminar is in it, and I just know he’s going to spend the entire class waxing poetic about existentialism and Kafka (jerking himself off, basically). Will taking a literature class make me a more cultured citizen of the world, or a douchebag? Did I just say “citizen of the world?” Fuck, it’s happening already. Should I opt for a math course and spend 3 months banging my head into a Sci Li wall over problem sets? Returning to the issue discussed earlier, does it make me a weenie if that’s the reason I don’t want to take the math course? Why did they let me into this school if I’m the sort of person who uses the word “weenie”?
Also, this is unimportant, but what do you do with the syllabi that accumulate by the end of it all? Just throw them away? Oh, I give up. Happy shopping, everyone.
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