It seems like only yesterday we were receiving syllabuses (syllabi?), rushing to 8 a.m.’s and learning professors’ names. I just got the hang of my slacking and cramming formula, just bought $1,000 worth of textbooks, just figured out ways to successfully text every day in class and just became Facebook friends with the guy in my 200-person lecture that I’d been eyeing all semester.

Now I’ll have to meet new classmates, flirt with new TAs, generate a new sleep pattern, spend the second half of my summer savings on textbooks and pound more useless information into my head. Good thing we have a big break before we must conquer that huge to-do list.

Picking classes is arguably more stressful than exams. Professors tell us the exact time, location and content of an exam. Some of us simply pop Adderall, study our asses off, cruise into class, bubble in some answers as the information vacates our brain, and leave for a marvelous winter break.

Choosing classes isn’t that simple. You get assigned a sign-up date and time, which is always conveniently in the middle of your 12-person computer-less recitation. So you are forced to hide your laptop in your coat and escape to the bathroom at exactly 2:40 p.m. to begin the registration rat race. You whip out the ideal schedule that you, your advisor and RateMyProfessors.com spent weeks perfecting – the one that gives you classes on only Mondays and Wednesdays, and none earlier than noon.

Of course, every class you want is taken, so you flush your ideal semester down the toilet and embark on the stressful journey of re-creating a schedule. Two hours later (and after a few visits from a concerned-for-your-bowel-health TA), you have a new agenda, one that looks nothing like the one floating through the sewer system.

So much for taking good classes; you’re now stuck with the reject courses, the uninteresting ones that you are destined to skip, then flunk so you graduate late, resulting in an additional semester worth of registration hell.

The only good thing that comes from first semester wrapping up is that now, I’m just a few months away from the completion of my sophomore year.

Yeah, life as a sophomore sucks. Not for the guys, I guess, who, no longer being the youngest, can actually get girls to sleep with them during their second year.

But life as a sophomore girl really does suck. We’re like wash-ups, dirty laundry, useless machinery. The athletic departments hate us because we know better than to buy football season tickets, and our parents don’t brag about us anymore because the pride of having a kid in college has started to wear off. As sophomores, our folks expect us to make the Dean’s List again, without understanding that we got our 3.8 GPAs in Spanish I, Human Sexuality and PHI 191.

Also, we sophomore girls have to actually pay for our own beer. Yes, little freshman, believe it or not, you won’t always be getting your booze for free. Eventually, the guys start to figure out which girls are unattractive, unavailable or uninterested, and thus donate their beer to those without ‘un’s’.

All we get as sophomores is the pressure of declaring a major, and the chance to start playing catch-up if we changed our direction completely.

So, bring on the registration, baby. Pour those Jager Bombs – it’s time for me and MySlice to spend some quality time together.

Talia Pollock is the pop culture columnist. Her columns usually run on Wednesdays. She hopes everyone enjoys registering for classes and would like to announce she is not, in fact, dating a banana. She can be reached at tpollock@syr.edu.

Published on November 10, 2008 at 12:00 pm