<p>crester, my own transition to HC was fairly easy given that, when I was a 1st year student, my sister was a senior at BMC, brother a sophomore at Swat (and parents at home about 2 hours away in the “poor house” because of us kids) I got the skinny on HC early on. Classes move fast as you would expect. I think the challenging thing to adjust to is time management. In high school, classes usually meet every day so there is less freedom for students to make their own schedule and to fall behind. In college, the tricky thing as I’m sure you remember is that classes can meet MWF or TTh and sometimes only weekly with a lot of reading, papers or projects assigned during the interim (ie read Bleak house in about a week, write a paper the following week about it, while reading another novel, with 3 other classes including taking organic chemistry freshman year). Developing the skills to budget time to prevent last minute cramming or all-nighters I think is the thing that trips up some students at the beginning, me included.</p>
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<p>Regarding limited enrollment classes, b@r!um posted this in the thread about HC sciences…</p>
<p>A note on limited enrollment classes:
The lottery results for spring semester classes have just been released and only two science classes had to use waitlists:</p>
<p>BIOLH363G01 Stem Cell Biology
PHYSH107B01 Living in a Fluid World</p>
<p>You can find the entire lottery list here:
[Haverford</a> College: Office of the Registrar](<a href=“http://www.haverford.edu/registrar/lotteryresults.php]Haverford”>http://www.haverford.edu/registrar/lotteryresults.php)</p>
<p>The lottery list contains all limited enrollment classes, including the ones where the number of pre-registered students stayed below the enrollment cap. Note that only 95 out of 361 courses offered in the spring semester have enrollment caps at all and less than half of those actually have to use waitlists.</p>
<p>Enrollment limits have not been an issue for me so far (I was lotteried out of one class for the spring semester but there are soooo many other interesting classes that I can take instead that I don’t really care).</p>
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<p>The athletic requirement is pretty easy to meet. I started freshman year playing club lacrosse (didn’t want the time commitment with varsity) and took tennis, fencing, archery at BMC, judo, CPR and independent running. A friend took African dance because of a cute girl. For procrastinators, you can put up graduation chairs senior year for credit but that’s pretty sad IMO and doesn’t make for good graduation memories. There’s independent walking at BMC so you can get gym credit by walking to get your morning Fruit Loops. I found this article on bowling funny when I read it a few years ago so remembered it enough to find it after some Googling…</p>
<p>[Bowling:</a> The Best-Kept Secret in Haverford P.E.](<a href=“The Bi-College News | Pardon our appearance as we move to a new site! Access to archives is unavailable currently.”>The Bi-College News | Pardon our appearance as we move to a new site! Access to archives is unavailable currently.)</p>
<p>Bowling: The Best-Kept Secret in Haverford P.E.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
By Andrew Ian Lipstein</p>
<p>Only one quarter-credit away from satisfying my Haverford gym requirement, I became truly worried about which pseudo-physical activity I could partake in. Any club or even intramural sport was too time-consuming. Self-paced running would involve too much self-paced running and none of the various classes offered at Haverford particularly tickled me in the right way. And then it came, almost straight from the heavens: a friend’s idea to get together some chums and bowl. </p>
<p>For those of you who don’t know, taking “bowling” here at Haverford entails being driven to a local bowling alley once a week and bowling two games free of charge. Sounds more like a FAB Friday night activity than a gym credit. </p>
<p>At first I was a bit skeptical about how much fun I would have playing a sport at which I completely blew. On the first day when I asked the alley-manager where the lightest bowling balls were, he berated me for a good five minutes about my miniscule testosterone-producing ability. If I weren’t such a strong person I might have broken down. So while using the neon-green bowling ball meant for eight-year-olds, I tried my severely testosterone-lacking body at the sport of bowling. </p>
<p>I learned you can only make fun of yourself so many times for gutterballing until it gets old. Eventually you just feel lonely and abandoned while your friends are high-fiving over their cool strikes and spares. But here’s the catch: being awful at bowling gives you a reason to try and get better. That is, after all, the point of a gym credit; so we can all graduate here slightly less terrible at bowling or with a minute knowledge of cardio-kickboxing. </p>
<p>So instead of playing the it’s-okay-that-I’m-miserable-at-bowling-I’m-good-at-other-things card, I took the game seriously. I quickly learned, for example, that you don’t stick your middle and pointer fingers in the ball (instead you use your ring and middle.)
Before I knew it, I was split over the strike-ingly good time I was having, instead of mo’pin’g. I could go on, but I’ll spare you. </p>
<p>There is something so communal and bond-forming about a sport so simple. Imagine trying to explain baseball to someone who has never seen the sport played. Now imagine the task of explaining football, or even soccer or tennis. </p>
<p>Now try bowling: You take a relatively heavy ball and try to knock down pins. That’s it. You knock **** down, as much as you can, the harder the better. There is something almost romantic in the purely entropy-causing activity of watching a ball you set in motion annihilating peaceful and placid skinny pieces of wood. And there is something instinctual and carnal in doing this destructive activity with friends, in a contest to see who can be more destructive. Plus, you wear sweet shoes. </p>
<p>This rant on the sport of bowling does have a conclusion and maybe even a purpose. My message is this: next time you are leafing through the gym credit opportunities, look past the conventional ways of satisfying Haverford’s peskiest requirement. Get a few friends together, do some wrist exercises, and knock some **** down. </p>
<p>Lipstein, a sophomore psychology and mathematics double major</p>
Whatever it is, I agree that HC’s culture encourages students to develop a skill set at an early age to feel comfortable speaking their minds and occasionally questioning authority figures and social norms. For example, the Honor Code puts down in writing that it is the expectation of the community for students to not walk away from any occasions when she/he is faced with an incident that makes them feel that the community’s trust or their own has been violated by the actions of another or by their own actions as well. This is really hard to do especially when young and, in practice, sometimes depending on the incident, the student may not engage in this civil “confrontation” despite feeling it’s appropriate. The thing is that, given HC’s Honor Code*, whether a student confronts someone or not, the student at least knows the ideal and is able to reflect on why/why not they lived up to those expectations which to me makes it a valuable educational tool and internal sounding board to have.</p>