STLCC has great courses that aren’t always the best fit
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
STLCC-Meramec is a great place for any student to figure out what they want to pursue. However, there are some bumps in the road at times. The following are the top ten signs, in no particular order, as to why you may have taken the wrong class.
1. The textbook:
There are many professors that may not use a class’s assigned textbook all that much, but there are plenty that do. The longer the textbook, the more anxiety you should have.
2. The syllabus length:
If it takes longer than two pages to explain your class, you should be worried.
3. The class size:
Depending on the kind of student one is, this can be a kind of double-edged sword. Smaller class sizes may led to more focus, and a better classroom experience overall because it allows for more personalized instruction. This only applies though, if you’re an extrovert. If you just want to blend in with the crowd and keep the focus off of yourself, you may hope for a larger class size. A larger class size though may mean that you have less opportunities to get questions answered.
4. Week 5:
Professor Ruth Eilerman often tells her students that Week 5 is the hardest week to get through for any student. She’s not wrong. Any student usually struggles more than usual during week 5, as the rigor from your studies begins to set in. If you’re in Week 5 of your course, and your questioning your life choices, you made a bad call.
5. You HATE the course material:
Some classes are absolutely necessary to meet graduation requirements. For those kinds of classes, students just need to bite the bullet
6. Your professor says the final is comprehensive:
College shouldn’t be a cake walk. But there is absolutely no need for any sort of comprehensive final. College isn’t high school and no one is here to waste time or needs that kind of busy work in their life.
7. Your professor announces a class project:
Class projects are the most high school thing imaginable. No one is coming to college and hoping it’s like high school. Not one single soul. Everyone wants to be responsible for their own grade. No one wants to do the work of multiple people.
8. Your professor wastes time with personal anecdotes:
College professors are in control of their own classroom and what they teach most of the time, and many are seasoned professionals, so they should be. Some of them are interesting. Some of them are painfully boring. But there are only so many minutes in a given class period, and time does fly by quicker than most realize when you have 16 chapters of a textbook to get through.
9. Your professor refuses to use the college’s online mediums:
The pandemic mostly curbed this problem by force, but as life begins to return to normal, some professors may return to being old fashioned and not use Canvas for anything other than posting grades. When Blackboard was around, there were a few notable professors (who will not be named) that refused to use it. Canvas may be a different platform but it serves essentially the same purpose. It’s 2023, and while technology can sometimes be frustrating, it does make a student’s experience easier to manage.
10. Your professor googles the word “Google” to get to Google.
Your professor may know a lot about whatever they’re talking about, but depending on who they are, they may not realize how ridiculous they are getting there.
