Reflecting on College

For a while now, I've had a desire to go back through my college transcript and figure out how many courses I didn't need to take. Now, by saying that, I don't mean courses that I didn't see the point of, like all of the math classes, or the Ethnic Studies class. No, I'm talking about courses that I ended up retaking for one reason or another. One example might be Physics 207 - Galaxies, Quasars, and Cosmology, which I took as a freshman and decided to retake as a junior for a better grade; I got a C in Spring of 2001, and I got a B in 2003, so as far as I'm concerned the improvement in my grade was negligible, and I'm counting one or the other as redundant. (Of course, this completely ignores the fact that I met two hotties when I took the course for the second time, but nothing came of either of them, so I suppose it's a wash.)

I graduated from Generic University at the end of Spring Term 2005, having taken courses during seventeen of the nineteen academic quarters between Fall 2000 and Spring 2005, fifteen of them full time. My transcript says that I had two hundred seventeen earned credit hours, twelve of which were pre-existing credits that I earned through the Advanced Placement program when I was in high school. Here are the courses that I took that I didn't need to take.

Fall 2000
HST 100 FRESHMEN ORIENTATION 1 credits
Winter 2001
ANTH 210 COMPARATIVE CULTURES 3 credits
Spring 2001
MTH 251 DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS 4 credits
PH 207 GALAXIES, QUASARS, COSMOLOGY 4 credits
Fall 2001
GER 111 FIRST-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
GER 199 SS/GERMAN CONVERSATION 1 credits
MTH 095 INTERMEDIATE ALGEBRA 3 credits
Winter 2002
GER 112 FIRST-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
GER 199 SS/GERMAN CONVERSATION 1 credits
Spring 2002
GER 113 FIRST-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
Fall 2002
GER 211 SECOND-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
Winter 2003
GER 212 SECOND-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
Spring 2003
GER 213 SECOND-YEAR GERMAN 4 credits
Fall 2003
HST 402 INDEPENDENT STUDY 3 credits
Winter 2004
HST 402 INDEPENDENT STUDY 3 credits
Fall 2004
BI 101 GENERAL BIOLOGY 4 credits
Total Unnecessary Credits: 51

Now, a couple of notes. First, you'll notice that German weighs pretty highly in this list. My professor was sort of a hard ass, and I didn't pass the last term of German with a high enough grade to get my second year equivalency. Rather than repeat an entire year of German, I decided to take a biology class and a math class and get my Bachelor of Science, vice my Bachelor of Arts. Really, though, those two years of German, plus the math and science, should have qualified my for two degrees: a BS in History and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on National Defense Policy. Instead, I have a BS in History with a minor in Naval Science. They didn't offer a major in Naval Science, or else I would have qualified: the minor requires twenty-seven credits, and I had around forty-eight, plus six that never went on the books.

Second, the courses up there were all courses that either became redundant or worthless later, courses that I failed or withdrew from, or courses that I later repeated to improve my grade.

It would be tempting to either complete second year Arabic, or study and test for second year German equivalency, and then see if I could get my one degree and minor reclassified as two degrees. Whether or not it would do anything in the long run is doubtful; I'll probably just try to trump the whole thing with a master's degree. However, what's the point in doing something if you don't hold some sort of debrief to figure out how you could have done it better? Then again, that's probably one of the purposes of college in the first place, to serve as a learning experience... In more ways that one, I suppose.