A little factoid, if you will: Penn considers students who take three courses full-time.
As soon as I found this out, a few days ago, I dropped my fourth course. Now I'm resting easy with a margarita in Puerto Rico. And by that I mean I just bought a Mountain Dew from Taco Bell. But does it ever taste glorious!
Here's how things went down: On Sunday night, I was preparing to analyze the etymology of 13 pages, two-columns, worth of verbs.
Verbs!
I went through about three verbs. 20 minutes later, I had dropped out of the course and into a NyQuil coma. I have a cold. I hate linguistics.
To be fair, there are those of you who shouldn't take just three courses. There can be financial aid implications, but don't have to be. If you're an athlete, administrators might sense something fishy.
But if you're a dutiful English major (check), or any of the other easy ones, don't be afraid to kick it for a couple of semesters. Your parents might be upset (by the way: Mom, I'm in three courses now. I'll call tonight. ish), but they don't live with you anymore. That's the whole point of college.
Here are some other ways of knowing you should take three courses:
1. It's October, and you haven't done any work for any courses. Good luck catching up in four (dare I say five!) courses, mac. Salvage what you can.
2. You are taking a pass/fail course. Why take any course at all? No one will stop you from graduating because of one bullshit elective.
3. Your fourth course is a linguistics course. If you want to know what kind of homework you'll be doing, see paragraph three. I'll wait. (Pause). Yeah, I thought so.
4. You edit 34th Street. You'll be writing way too many e-mails about hyphens vs. dashes to think coherently.
But if you're all academic-like, please, take as many courses as you'd like. Should you change your mind, I'll be sunbathing at Taco Bell. Come see me. I've got a Mountain Dew with your name on it.
