Opinion: Banking on Syllabi

Austin Belet, Opinons Writer

Though we are midway through the semester, I want you to reminisce with me about the anxiety that creeps in your soul as we approach a new semester. Recall, for a moment, the hesitation in purchasing textbooks or trying to decide how to best structure your time. Can I work Wednesday night? Hell, maybe if class doesn’t have 314 papers I need to write.

I don’t think there is any way to truly eliminate this kind of anxiety from college students lives, we more or less have to deal with it if we are being honest with each other. One way that we can help to reduce this kind of stress on our lives is by allowing us a peek into the lives we will be leading throughout the semester.

With the creation of a Syllabus Bank, students will now have the ability to know what we have gotten ourselves into for each of our classes. We will know exactly how much work needs to be done to keep up with our classes, what books we will actually have to use, and how to contact our professors in advance.

Some professors are not as enthusiastic about the creation of such a resource, some arguing that it infringes on their intellectual property, others (I’m sure) argue that it infringes one their time.’

I remember being a Senator in Student Government and voting on a measure that would establish this exact resource, thinking of how useful it could be for students to be able to check into our classes ahead of time. To find out that we are only moving forward on it now, two year later, is rather frustrating.

Being able to check out the syllabus prior to the beginning of the semester is a way that allows students to better structure our schedule by working with our employers, better allocate our resources so we can properly tell what books we will need and when we will need them, as well as being able to tell if a course is something we would actually be interested in taking.

I’m sorry to the professors who may not be to happy with the establishment of this resource, but I am thoroughly happy that we have this at our disposal.

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