It's your college orientation, and the day has finally come; you get to create your first semester schedule! After you fill up your schedule with about 5 different classes, two, at most, are directly related to your major. The others are probably GE's.

GE's, Gen Eds, or their actual name: General Education classes. Everyone has to take a certain number of them before being able to graduate, no matter what college you go to. I'm a firm believer that General Education classes are important and should be required for graduation, but I think that the system needs to reevaluate what the university requires of its students.

General Education classes force students to learn classes outside of their major. Gen Eds can be fantastic for meeting people outside of your major and learning about subjects that you have a slight interest in, but not enough to want to major or minor in.

The requirements of many colleges are a large part of the classes that students have to take. There are 121 hours of classes required to graduate, and at least a quarter of those are General Education classes. At Ohio State, one of the requirements is to have ten credit hours of science classes including at least one lab. While many students now have credits that they come to college with, those that don't have these pre-college credits often struggle to finish their degree in four years.

When students sign up for these classes, the normal goal is to make sure that they can get the easiest class or one that doesn't take a ton of work. No college student is going to sign up for OChem for a "fun" GE. The other issue with science classes is that students are on all different levels, so what is easy for one student is the hardest thing to learn for another. Last semester I took the science class with a lab and I spent 5 hours each week essentially relearning middle school science.

One of the things that Ohio State pushes is the ability to double up some of the different classes and requirements. However, the classes that overlap are mostly humanities, like the Second Level Writing and Visual/Performing Arts. It shouldn't be that students are required to take a certain number of credits from different subjects that might interest them more.

I would much rather be able to have the ability to minor in the subjects that interest me most, rather than having to take many different classes over some topics that I don't care much about, but is the best option for the section.

Science majors probably want to take fewer classes about the arts and those that are writing based. Art majors don't want to have to take science, and math, and statistics classes. The university should give the students more freedom to build their degree and their college experience the way that they want it. General Education credits are important to learn about topics outside of your major, but sometimes the class doesn't have anything that can be taken out of them, no matter how hard the professors and advisors reach to create these connections.