A new school year is upon us, so in my usual last-second style, I’d like to share some advice on getting through college. You know, the word school comes from the Greek skhole or leisure, in that it was assumed only someone with free time on their hands could allow themselves intellectual pursuits. In the same vain, the Latin term for a teacher was magister ludi or master of games, also putting school together with fun and pleasure. And yet. The games we play in college are language games. You choose your games as courses, the rules are laid out beforehand in the syllabus, and the players each receive a score at the end in the form of their grade, with all their scores tallied on their transcript (like a baseball card). So, it is with a view to maximizing leisure and minimizing strain, so as to best enjoy our games, that I share the following.

Get your textbooks through interlibrary loan. Don’t waste hundreds of dollars a semester at your university book store, or fewer hundreds buying textbooks online, when most school libraries provide interlibrary loans for free to their students. With an interlibrary loan, you fill out a form with the title, author, etc, which you give to your librarian (sometimes you can do this online), who then calls other university libraries until he finds one which has the book, and the other school then mails it to your library, which lends it to you. This can be done with almost any book. Renewing interlibrary loans can be tricky, but the loaner universities usually don’t have a way to make you pay late fees if you keep their books overdue. Your library might revoke your loaning privileges though, if you keep pissing off other libraries, so it’s best to copy or scan all the pages you’ll need that semester, typically listed in your syllabus. As they can take a week or two, request your books ahead of time.

Lazy? Register for all your classes at the end of the add/drop period. Most universities have an add/drop period at the beginning of each semester, usually 1-3 weeks long, during which students can register, drop or switch classes, so if they don’t like their professor, aren’t interested in the subject, or whatever, they can get out of their classes without losing their tuition money. Professors don’t penalize students who switch into their classes late and most will help them catch up. Of course, by doing this you risk having the good classes fill up, but then sometimes a class that’s been filled for months becomes available last day as someone drops. Done right, registering like this can add months to your leisure time over the course of your college life.

Research your professors. This is very important. When you don’t know your teachers, one class seems as good as another of the same name. However, Prof. A might be easy-going, interesting, and a generous grader, while Prof. B will break your back with assignments as he sucks out any life from his class, which he’ll fail you should you ever cut. This is especially treacherous for those who register at the end of add/drop. The tried-and-true way to get around this dangerous dilemma is to ask people who took classes with the professor before, but this takes time and social skills. The new-and-easy way is through the internet via websites like RateMyProfessor.com, where you can quickly look up the mysterious names in your course catalog and find out the important things, like how strict they are, how much homework they give, and if they’re at all interesting. Of course, like with Wikipedia, with these websites you’re relying on the opinions of a bunch of strangers, which may not be accurate portrayals of the teachers in question. But if you were about to sign up for a semester in hell with one of Beelzebub’s daughters and there were hundreds of souls trying to warn you on RateMyProfessor, wouldn’t you want to know? That’s all I got for now.