Shopping Period

One fun thing about most American colleges is that the undergraduate students get to "shop" for classes in the first one or two weeks of the semester, which means we can add or drop classes as we like during the two-week shopping period. That is possible because in most cases, students have the chance to take any course they like, regardless of their majors or concentrations, provided they meet the course pre-requisites. For example, although I only plan to take 5 courses this semester, my time-table for Wednesday look like this because of "window-shopping":

8:00 - University Writing Seminar

9:00 - Introduction to Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

10:00 - Modern China - Ming to Mao

11:00 - Organic Chemistry

12:00 - Quantum Theory

1:00 - Introduction to Computers

2:00 - Introduction to 3D Animation

3:00 - Multivariable Calculus.


Which effectively means classes from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 pm.

Of these courses I'm sure I will be taking:

1. University Writing Seminar
2. Multivariable Calculus
3. Organic Chemistry
4. One Physics course (Thermodynamics or Quantum Theory)
5. 3D animation or The Economics of Third World Hunger

The reason I'm shopping so many courses is that I want to avoid the horrible experience in my Modern Physics class last semester, where I learnt less than a third of the material and not knowing what the lecturer was talking about for the entire semester - by shopping for more courses, if anything went wrong in one particular class, I can just substitute that class with another.
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Also....I'm a bit worried about Multivariable Calculus because I decided to skip the Single Variable Calculus course, since I've learnt most of the content in STPM. However, STPM Math didn't help students to develop a good understanding of calculus....so.....ya....very sien one. I did pretty ok for math last semester, hopefully history will repeat.