Getting used to life at college after more than a decade of studying in primary and secondary school can be tough. The academics are more rigorous and there’s much more pressure to perform well. Most students live on campus, so they also have a lot more newfound freedom to do whatever they please with their time.
However, the worst adjustment of all is to the class scheduling system. I think the system followed by primary educational institutes (elementary, middle and high schools) to plan all classes for all students within a certain period of the day provides for the best optimization of time. Schools follow it, and most work environments follow it as well; so why not college?
At NC State, classes are offered from 8:30 a.m. to 10:15 p.m. during the five working days of the week. Some students are fortunate enough to be able to enroll in all of their courses in such a way that their schedule seems more or less constant on all days of the week, but there are others who have no choice but to enroll in whichever classes and sections that are available and open.
It is a well-known fact that first-years and second-years are at the bottom of the enrollment food chain, as their enrollment dates are much later — while enrollment for the Spring and Summer of 2018 started on October 18, first-years and second-years did not receive access through the MyPack Portal until the first week of November. This would cause most of the popular courses’ time slots to fill up and close much earlier, resulting in the majority of students forming pretty scattered schedules.
While my schedule for the spring of 2018 isn’t absolutely horrible, I did end up with some of my daily class timings being inconveniently spread out through the day. As a second-year limited by the enrollment dates, I could have avoided this if we followed a predefined time period for classes.
On some days, you could have lectures throughout the day with little or no gaps between two consecutive ones, whereas on others, you may just have a single 50-minute lecture before you’re done for the day. You could also have odd spaces of time between two classes — too short to go back home and return, and too long to directly attend your next lecture. This causes a lot of non-uniformity due to having a different timetable for each day of the week.
Having all of your heavy classes on just one or two days of the week can get pretty tiring. Also, an entire day of lectures leaves no time for self-study, since there’s a high chance that homework assignments will demand your immediate attention the minute you reach your dorm. Occupied evenings mean no time for extracurricular activities like club meetings or even socializing or maybe just unwinding either.
According to NC State’s attendance policy, most courses allow only one or two unexcused absences — so in all practical purposes, attendance is compulsory. So, you’re already stuck with a bad schedule, and to make things worse, you don’t have the option to not attend a particular lecture and devote that time to studying on your own — unless you’re willing to lose participation credit.
There’s a lot of scope for this uneven balance to wreck your sleep schedule, which, to be honest, is already messed up for the average college student. Sleep deprivation causes daytime fatigue, which can hinder your academic performance.
Ultimately, it would be much better if there were an option to organize college classes out by having a preset amount of time during in which all classes on campus are held. I fully understand that the way college classes are scheduled has been carefully thought of and reviewed, and I am not denying that it is meticulously organized, but I do believe that a system in which students are continuously engaged as opposed to abruptly interrupted by breaks at irregular intervals would provide more ways to utilize everyone’s time and energy more efficiently.
