Disclaimer: The Ivory Belltower is purely satirical. Don’t take it too seriously.

It’s almost that time of the semester again when students have their laptops open in the middle of class with a shaking finger hovering over the mouse. Your eyes are glued on the second hand ticking closer and closer to that time you had highlighted and circled four times on your desk calendar, the time for which you set two alarms on your cell phone. It is more stressful than the midterms you took last week; you know that your whole career, and entire future for that matter, depend on how quickly you can click “enroll” compared to everyone else.

It would be much easier to focus without all the honors and scholars kids watching; to their enjoyment, all the other students suffer through a grueling experience that they will never have to understand with their early enrollment perks. 

But when you take into account all the preparation time you put into making your amazing-no-8-a.m.s-or-classes-on-Fridays masterpiece, you’d do anything to turn all those blue squares of anticipation into green blocks of happiness. After all, if your schedule isn’t exactly how you want it at the second you hit “enroll,” it never will be. Hardly anyone is going to swap and drop their classes during the entire two months before the actual First Day of Classes. And the waitlist is the biggest tease of all. Here, you can kind of have the class for now. Ha, as if that will ever work out.

Rate My Professors might as well be renamed “Water” because that’s how much you need it to plan a schedule you can actually survive next semester. What better way is there to get the inside scoop than from the students willing to tell you just how amazing or awful that professor was? Even if the comments about the professor are for a different course they taught in the past, you should take them into consideration. Maybe the course was a much higher level. Maybe that professor taught the course at a different university. Regardless, once you see “tough grader” and “gives pop quizzes,” it’s best to just cross them off the list. Sure, it’s possible that someone had a bad day and decided to rant about his or her professors online, but are you seriously willing to take that chance? I think not. The worst-case scenario is searching for the professor only to find that they are not, in fact, on the website. Then you know it must be bad. What is the professor hiding? It doesn’t even matter, just cross the course off the list and never look back.

Let’s not forget about grade distributions. If the percentage for A’s is less than 30 percent, you might as well just accept the D on your transcript now. If an entire third of that professor’s past victims couldn’t ace their tests, obviously you won’t either, so there’s no point in trying to live up to Tom Cruise standards for this impossible mission. Make sure you check all the semesters listed. Yes, I mean every single one. Spring 2015 and fall 2014 are not enough. Your potential professor could have taught another section six, eight, 11 years ago. It’s essential to make sure all the percentages are consistent. If too many people failed back in 2003, then you’re doomed for spring 2016. 

So set aside your homework because who has time for that with all the research you need to be doing? Having a top-notch schedule is necessary in order to succeed in every degree. The pressure is on, Wolfpack, and if you don’t have every possible combination of courses, and teachers and times prepared and prioritized when those two alarms go off … well, good luck.