Step #3: Identify Courses and Organize a Possible Schedule
You’re making good progress! You’ve reflected carefully on your interests and priorities, browsed Dickinson’s departments and programs, and are ready to identify specific courses for your first semester…
TOOLS FOR THE JOB
The first step is to identify the courses that best suit your interests and priorities. Your decision-making will involve a combination of searching for available courses and making strategic decisions.
Good news: Dickinson’s online course selection tool, Banner, includes several powerful search features that can help you identify courses that best fit you. Banner is accessed through a tab (SSB Button) on the Dickinson Gateway. For help, you can use this handbook.
More good news: Dickinson professors want to make it easy for you to strategize! They have organized their best guidance for incoming students in Academic Programs and Majors Advising Guides specific to each department.
- Advising Guides provide a useful introduction or overview of the field and advise what courses prospective majors should take.
The last step is to make sure that the courses you’re considering will fit together. Courses are only offered Monday through Friday (yes, you MUST find something else to do with yourself over the weekend!). There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can’t be in two places at the same time.
Good news: We’ve created a nifty organizer and a blank scheduling worksheet that shows common course meeting times.
More good news: Many popular courses offer multiple sections that meet at different times
Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing Your Schedule
You may find that your schedule snaps together without much effort because your decisions seem straightforward or you find solutions intuitively. However, if you encounter complications (often these involve a single course that is offered at multiple times or two classes that are offered at the same time), here’s a tried-and-tested method of building your schedule:
- Block out the meeting time of your First-Year Seminar. Your First-Year Seminar is the keystone of your first-semester schedule, and you need to plan your other courses so that they fit without overlapping or creating time conflicts.
- Note all the available meeting times for your second course. We recommend using a different color pen for each course to make things easy to read, and we also recommend starting with your language course: most first-year language courses meet five times per week in the morning. When a single course is available at different times, we distinguish among the various meeting times as different “sections.” For example, ECON 111-02 is the 2nd section of ECON 111, and it meets at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday and Friday.
- Repeat step #2 for your third course. If you request a natural science course with a laboratory component, we recommend entering it next. Lab courses include a special lab meeting time for six classroom hours per week. (Again, we recommend using a different color pen for each course.)
- Repeat step #2 for your fourth course.
- Choose specific courses and course sections that fit together without overlapping. (The example scheduling worksheets, linked below, show this step using yellow circles.)
If you have multiple options, we recommend you spread your courses evenly throughout the week.
- Look ahead at the number of students that can be accommodated in the sections you’re considering through Course Priorities; Dickinson keeps its class sizes small, even for lectures.
Nifty Organizer: Blank Scheduling Worksheet
Sample Worksheet #1
Sample Worksheet #2
Are you ready? On to Step 4: Course Request and Schedule Adjustment