As any 20-something can tell you, college kids develop a lot of useful abilities over the course of their four years, few of which, unfortunately, can be put on a resume. There’s the guy who can drink like a fish Sunday night and roll into class on Monday noticeably sans hangover. There’s the girl who aces a midterm seemingly without studying. Of course, there are less useful abilities, too -- having an uncanny ability to find the nearest bathroom in record time, knowing when to go to your favorite café on campus to avoid lines, or maybe just being able to find a parking spot in that stupidly crowded campus lot. As a college student, I can tell you that I, too, have a talent. My talent is dropping classes.
My school, Western Washington University, gives students two late-withdrawals a year. During my freshman and sophomore years, while I was still honing this gift, I managed to use all of them, escaping classes where I slept through the first exam, failed the midterm, and/or walked out mid-class while the professor and other students stared. All this practice culminated in my first week of classes this year, where I added and dropped five classes in one frenetic hour online. I think it’s safe to say that as far as dropping classes goes, I’ve attained professional status, so there’s really no one better qualified to explain the conditions under which to drop a class.
Sometimes it becomes obvious right away that you’re not going to make it through a particular class. The material’s too hard, the professor’s teaching style is more boring than a bowl of plain oatmeal, or you’ve realized the folly of signing up for an 8 a.m. and want to save yourself. There’s not always one big reason to opt out of what you formerly opted into. Sometimes it’s a combination of things. My panicked class-dropping this year was kicked off by a professor teaching an English class who welcomed us by providing a list of vocabulary words on an overhead projector (something I thought died in 2009), telling us that we’d be doing next to no writing, and rounding things out by defining the word ‘diaspora’ in unsubtly anti-Semitic fashion. Add that to the group project we were meant to do and the fact that the final was at 8 a.m. at the end of finals week, and I was ready to bail. So I did, and found a class that would suit my needs better... After frantically searching for said class for an hour.
It’s not always this simple, however. Sometimes it takes midway through the class until you realize that you’re not going to make it. Say you’ve slept through a test like me, and know there’s no way to recover your grade. It’s best to drop the class and retake it again later. Trust me, it’s easier dealing with the dubious shame of a withdrawal than trying to drag your GPA back up after a failing grade. Similarly, if you’re studying your hardest and still consistently falling short, you should drop the class, figure out what you were struggling with, and come back later armed with a study guide and your tutor’s phone number on speed dial. Do what you need to do to feel successful, and believe me, you don’t feel at all successful when looking back and thinking “I should have gotten out of there when I had the chance.”
That said, dropping a class isn’t the solution for every problem. Get some sleep. Study. Don’t go out drinking the night before an exam. And, you know, don’t sleep through one, either. But you can rest easy knowing that if you do, there’s no shame in dropping a class. I should know – I’m a professional.
