By Joe Pratt | LTVN Reporter/Anchor
At this point, moving toward the end of February, mostly everyone has settled into their classes for the rest of the year. Whether we added, dropped or switched sections, the majority of students are locked into courses for the spring.
However, back in November, students went through the processes of registering for classes. After meeting with advisers, planning and trying to log into BearWeb as fast as they could, people filled out their road map for the upcoming semester as well as for their time at Baylor.
Like many others, I experienced struggle in signing up for classes that I wanted. It seemed like problems arose with any course I tried to fit into my weeks, whether it conflicted with another class or had too many students in it already.
Other students may have discovered similar issues. Someone may want to sign up for their business class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 a.m., but it wouldn’t work out because their required art class is full in every other section, and they need to take art at 11:15 a.m. Having to work their schedule out so they could take everything yet still have time to relax and eat at decent times was hard, to say the least.
Expanding the sizes of classes is the simplest and most realistic tactic at overcoming this problem. While some classes simply cannot hold the capacity for more students, there are other classrooms on campus that don’t fill up and can accommodate a larger number of students. How come an engineering major is unable to take a required course for engineering because there aren’t any openings in the class? Students attend this university to study something they are passionate about and something that they will turn into a career, but they are inhibited by this because a classroom is too small.
It could be because Baylor enrolled 4,271 students last fall, and to be blunt, Baylor simply cannot hold enough students to provide them what they want. If the money spent by the increased number of students was allocated more toward benefiting peoples’ educations, this would not be a problem. Money should always be spent to improve the education and experience of students, not on something like a brand new welcome center that will only attract prospective students to this university, where they can also struggle to sign up for the classes that they came here for.
We come to Baylor in hopes of expanding our knowledge and broadening our interests. One finds out which path they will choose in life through experiencing various different subjects. Accumulating knowledge and building a diverse perspective about what someone truly wants to do is one of the most vital aspects of advancing through higher education. If Baylor allows everyone to expand upon their interests, it is giving them the opportunity to find out who they are and what they really want to do in this world.
