Find Your Classes

This is more of an issue for people who are on a large campus, but if your school has more than one building then it would be a good idea to follow this suggestion too.

Basically, today many colleges are enormous, self-sustaining entities. The university I'm attending has its own police department, fire department, convince store, restaurants / bars, and its own zip code. From one side of campus to the other is about 2 miles. Unfortunately, a lot of your transportation is going to be done on foot.

With this in mind, you do not want to spend 15 minutes walking in circles trying to find the building that your class is in. My own first-hand experience would probably offer the best reason why you do not want to do this. I thought I knew where my class was. I had my schedule and the map of my campus. I knew the general area where the building was. I left with what I thought was enough time to get there. Well, I get to the area that I thought the building was out and wouldn't you know it, it wasn't there. So I started walking around looking for one of the larger maps that my campus has placed in various areas. I find one, find again where I think the building is, and go off on my merry way. Another 5 minutes passes and I still haven't found the place. Now I'm starting to worry because my class is supposed to start in a few minutes. To make a longer story short, though, I finally found the building. I was late, so I rushed upstairs only to find that the class had been canceled for that week because it was a lab and labs didn't meet the first week.

So that little story brings up a few points I want to go over. The most important point, though, is basically to take some time before classes start to walk around campus and make sure you know where each of the buildings that you have class in are located. It's much better to spend some time wandering around when you don't have anywhere to be than to be panicking when you can't find your class and it starts in two minutes.

Another point is this - Do Not Trust Maps. The maps that most large colleges provide can be helpful, but they can cause as much harm as they can good. Many times the buildings are represented by a box with an abbreviated name over it. The maps generally do not show the front entrance and are usually not drawn to scale all that well. The reason I couldn't find my building was because I walked by it several times but the map didn't show where the door was and the building didn't have its name on it.

This brings me to my second point - sometimes it's hard to spot the right building. Many times buildings are placed side by side by side. If they aren't well marked it can be very easy to walk into one building, thinking it's the right one, and then find out that it is not the building that you were looking for (this is another thing that I did my first week of classes).

So basically, it is definitely worth the little bit of extra time and effort to go and scout out where your classes will be held before the first day of classes. In the long run it will save a lot of time and frustration.