It seems to be the case at many American universities that the deadline for finalizing your schedule is usually a couple weeks into the semester. This gives you time to try out a bunch of classes, and to only keep the ones you think will be most valuable. So, I would always recommend signing up for as many as possible, and then going to all of them for the first couple of weeks to figure out which ones are the best, and then dropping down to only the best opportunities.
Also, if you expect a class to be fabulous, and then the first day is boring, I think it’s usually best to drop it. The first day of the class is the professor’s one opportunity to really wow students, and if they have no enthusiasm on day 1, I don’t think there’s hope going forward. I wasted so much time taking classes that I thought would surely “get better once we were talking about real stuff.” But that never happened. For all of my favorite classes, I knew they would be great on my first day. And for all of my worst classes: they were bad on the first day.
Lastly, if you’re able to sign up to pass/fail classes, I highly recommend that as a not-super-stressful-way to hold you accountable for learning a skill set that you know is important, but which you also know you won’t have the dedication to learn on your own. For instance, I took two computer science courses my senior year because I knew if I graduated without having programming experience, I would never have the drive to learn it myself. It was an incredible experience because I could just do the homework well enough to understand the content at the level I was interested in learning, and then didn’t have to spend the extra effort I would have needed in order to get an “A” for my GPA’s sake. Those two computer science classes are probably ~20% of the reason I was able to land my research job directly out of college. A lot of students seem to “save” their pass/fail credits in case they do much worse in a class than they expected and want to be able to avoid the negative GPA impacts. But, I think for highly motivated students, they end up never really using those pass/fail credits, and waste an opportunity to take useful classes with really low-stakes.
I think this is excellent advice.
Some additional thoughts:
It seems to be the case at many American universities that the deadline for finalizing your schedule is usually a couple weeks into the semester. This gives you time to try out a bunch of classes, and to only keep the ones you think will be most valuable. So, I would always recommend signing up for as many as possible, and then going to all of them for the first couple of weeks to figure out which ones are the best, and then dropping down to only the best opportunities.
Also, if you expect a class to be fabulous, and then the first day is boring, I think it’s usually best to drop it. The first day of the class is the professor’s one opportunity to really wow students, and if they have no enthusiasm on day 1, I don’t think there’s hope going forward. I wasted so much time taking classes that I thought would surely “get better once we were talking about real stuff.” But that never happened. For all of my favorite classes, I knew they would be great on my first day. And for all of my worst classes: they were bad on the first day.
Lastly, if you’re able to sign up to pass/fail classes, I highly recommend that as a not-super-stressful-way to hold you accountable for learning a skill set that you know is important, but which you also know you won’t have the dedication to learn on your own. For instance, I took two computer science courses my senior year because I knew if I graduated without having programming experience, I would never have the drive to learn it myself. It was an incredible experience because I could just do the homework well enough to understand the content at the level I was interested in learning, and then didn’t have to spend the extra effort I would have needed in order to get an “A” for my GPA’s sake. Those two computer science classes are probably ~20% of the reason I was able to land my research job directly out of college. A lot of students seem to “save” their pass/fail credits in case they do much worse in a class than they expected and want to be able to avoid the negative GPA impacts. But, I think for highly motivated students, they end up never really using those pass/fail credits, and waste an opportunity to take useful classes with really low-stakes.