Tragic! This Girl Is Agonizing over Which Recitation to Choose Even Though She'll Be Skipping It Anyway

Sydney Gawain (C '21) is a Type-A personality: she needs everything to fall into its perfect place, and that means that when it comes time for course selection, she needs her schedule to be just so. “I meticulously plan everything,” explained Gawain. “I need to know exactly where I will be and when. A difference of a half hour can be absolutely crucial; should I sign up for the 9:00 a.m. Econ recitation on Thursday, or the 9:30 one on Friday? On the one hand, I am much less likely to get lit the night before a Thursday, but on the other, I’m not a morning kind of gal, you know? I need my beauty rest. So although I will almost certainly get blasted at a mixer the night before, the 9:30 Friday seems so much more appealing just because that half hour of sleep can mean the difference between me being a zombie and me being… a slightly more alive zombie.” 

Gawain has certainly proven that a half hour can make all the difference: in first semester she missed her Math 104 recitation 95% of the time because it was at 8:00 AM, but this semester she only missed her 114 recitation 92% of the time. “I don’t know if your readers have taken statistics and attended as many stat recitations as I have, but the difference between these two numbers is hella significant,” remarked Gawain. “This just goes to show you the importance of proper planning. It can mean all the difference between effectively never being there and generally never being there.”

Although to the uneducated it might appear that Gawain’s decision ultimately has no impact on her schedule or her life, Gawain would like to differ. “Like, yeah, true, I’ll maybe go to this recitation once,” she conceded, “but for every subsequent time that I skip it I have to deal with the crippling guilt of knowing that I’m skipping classes for which my parents are paying $75,000 a year. And honestly, I’m not sure if I’d rather feel guilty at 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM.”