Before college, I was used to an academic path that was already laid out. In my home country, there’s a national curriculum that determines both the subjects you take and the order you take them in. There’s, frankly, comfort in that structure. You don’t spend much time asking what you want to study when a new semester comes around, because the answer has already been decided. You simply move forward.
So it came as a pleasant surprise when, in my first semester of college, I opened our school portal and saw over 800 courses available for the semester. Eight hundred. Mathematically speaking, in the crudest sense (ignoring prerequisites, placements, and all the ways reality complicates things), there were roughly 800C4 = 16938959800 ways to build a schedule. And then the panic set in: What do you mean I have to choose four out of these 800? Why is this my job? Why is this my decision, when my academic path had always been planned out and handed to me in high school?
But then again, I was at a college with an open curriculum–one that actively emphasizes exploration–so the culture shock made sense. During that same first week, I thankfully learned about add-drop season: a short window at the start of the semester when you’re not only allowed, but encouraged, to explore, sit in on classes, and change your mind.
Like my previous semesters, my first week this spring was spent almost entirely moving from classroom to classroom. On some days, I attended more classes than I was officially enrolled in. I checked different Moodle pages, listened to professors walk through their syllabi, paid attention to how they explained ideas, and tried to imagine what it would be like to live with each class for an entire semester. I remember sitting in one lecture thinking, this is fascinating, and in another thinking, this is great, but maybe not right now.
Cold snow and freezing walks between classrooms aside, the whole process was overwhelming at times. Narrowing down a schedule when everything looks good is surprisingly hard. But it was also fun in a way I hadn’t expected. There was definitely joy in wandering and in letting myself be curious. At Amherst, my education felt less like something I was following and more like something I was actively shaping. I’m also very aware that this kind of choice is a privilege. Having the freedom to struggle over decisions because all the options are genuinely good is not something everyone gets. Even in moments of stress, I felt grateful that my problem was having too many interesting classes, not too few!
Of course, there are still classes I wish I hadn’t dropped. There always are. What helped was realizing that dropping a class didn’t mean closing a door forever. Courses come back. Professors teach again. Some ideas simply wait for a different semester, and that’s okay.
Add-drop season taught me that exploration and uncertainty often go hand in hand. Letting go of a fully planned path can be uncomfortable, especially if you’ve grown up within one. But it can also be freeing. For someone as indecisive as me, those weeks were about learning how to choose, and learning to be okay with not knowing right away. And that, in itself, felt like a worthwhile lesson, so, here’s to my fourth semester of enjoying the liberal arts!