Shopping day!

After a busy orientation week, the start of classes is officially upon us. Today is “shopping day,” something of a course bazaar that happens immediately before classes begin each semester. On shopping day, a selection of courses are presented in 20-minute capsule form to allow students to sample them as they build their course schedules for the semester. For most students, course registration has been open for several weeks, and many students have a fairly set plan for their semester at this point. Still, it’s helpful to have the opportunity to spend a few minutes with an unfamiliar faculty member, check out a syllabus, and get a general sense of a course’s content before officially committing to it. Around three dozen courses are typically included in shopping day, but it’s still a small segment of the overall Fletcher curriculum. The selection varies semester to semester, but it’s common for new courses, seminar courses, or new faculty to be featured on shopping day. It’s a day that involves a lot of scurrying about, a few last-minute schedule tweaks for some students, and in many cases, the first opportunity for returnees to meet our new students. Tomorrow, classes begin for real!