University Seminar is one of those classes many freshmen love to hate. Or just hate. The purpose behind this class is to introduce you to college but sometimes it just made everything more difficult.
It was time consuming and very inconvenient. Not getting a chance to schedule the class on my own made it harder to schedule other classes because of having to work around that one. Then there was that other class I was forced into.
Each of the University classes were separated by college and also placed into another class together. The purpose of this was to help us make friends and form study groups.
I really don’t need someone trying to make friends for me. That’s not exactly on the top of my priority list and is also something I’m perfectly capable of on my own. This just made me feel like I was being babied.
We are required to attend at least two workshops and that didn’t seem so bad until I noticed how many of them interfered with classes or work.
I know a lot of students had this same problem and were told that it was our responsibility to fit them into our schedules. That’s not very helpful. If it wasn’t for hours-long fairs, I probably wouldn’t have any workshop credit.
No one really takes the class seriously because of the childish activities we had to endure. I could have been doing something that actually matters during the 50-minute periods of standing in a circle playing a name game or answering questions about how many Asians attend ULM.
I don’t mean any disrespect to my instructor, peer leader or Dr. Michaelides who was more than happy to speak with me about the class. I know they put a lot of work into preparing everything for us but this kind of thing just isn’t for everyone.
There were some topics I did find interesting and were a little more relevant like registration, handling money and partying issues. I could see those topics being made into mandatory workshops or meetings for freshmen. It could be similar to how convocation was, except without the useless group walk from the bell tower to the coliseum.
The book is actually a very good idea, especially if it could be more like a manual and less like a textbook. Replace all of the little activities with more information on ULM oriented things.
Although there is already a lot of useful information in the book I doubt many students realize that because it’s something associated with a class that they dread going to. When I think about it I could probably count how many times I opened that book on one hand.
The funding that goes into making the planners could be combined with the book and include event calendars with important dates and workshops. The book could replace the class all together and become one source of information that all first year students should have access to. The fee for it could be included in the tuition. Everything else already is.
