please send good registration karma my way
Tomorrow at 9:40am I
finally get to register for my Fall courses. Being low on the totem pole, others have already registered ahead of me. I just checked the enrollment numbers for the three classes I want to take and the one
I really want to take only has three openings. It's a "genre studies in American Lit" course, which means it's different each semester, and this particular version of it is described as such:
This course focuses upon American Fiction's development from the 19th into the 20th centuries, touching upon American Romantics, Realists, Naturalists, Feminists, and Modernists. Economic systems (slavery, women's oppression, whaling, advertising, autos), and their technologies (ships, trains, electricity, telephony, internal combustion engines, film cameras) provide context for and influence upon the American fiction of the period from the Civil War to the Second World War (1860s to 1930s). Probable authors covered include Hawthorne, Douglass, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Freeman, James, Gilman, Wharton, Stein, Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck.
I want to take this course, and I want to take it
now. Wah. So, please send some good registration karma my way, so that three other people do not register for it before 9:40am tomorrow. The other two courses, a materials and methods course and a theory course, still have 10 or so openings, so I'm not worried about them.
Then again, this could be some sort of message from the universe. There are two options for said message:
- This particular course starts at 4pm. I have one other course that starts at 4pm, and one at 7pm. My boss would like it better if I only had the one course start at 4pm. If I don't get into ENGL 254, I'll be choosing a 7pm course to replace it. This could be the universe telling me to make my boss happy.
- Knowing that if I continue on to a PhD program (still a big "if") not all of my credits will transfer, I was holding off as long as possible (like until the PhD program!) to study areas that really don't interest me, such as 17th C British Lit. If I don't get into ENGL 254, one of the few other courses I could substitute is 17th C British Lit. This could be the universe telling me to get my survey courses in order now, otherwise I'll get all those questions wrong on the GRE subject test and/or I'll do a crappy job on the MA exam.
If the universe is telling me anything, it's likely the second option. Then again, I could sneak in as the last person to register for ENGL 254. I've had remarkably good luck with registration at this school. But all is not lost, because one other option to replace the course is 20th C British Lit, covering most of the novels I just read last semester, and with the same prof. Perhaps I could ease some of my anxiety by taking that class, instead of 254 which is mostly "new" things...although "new" things that I want to learn. Hmm.
