Pick your “bird courses” carefully

For those of you who don’t know a “bird course” is a very easy course that requires minimal work in order to do well. These courses are very popular among students who are trying to boost their GPA, students who want to have a full course load but who still want to have a lot of free time for their other commitments, and students looking for easy electives. In case you were wondering I fall into the second category :p Unfortunately, things do not always go as planned and believe me when I tell that when it backfires it backfires hard! Allow me to recount my experience with one of my “bird courses”.

Essentially, there was this very cool biology course that I wanted to take since students were required to design and execute their own experiments. However, the day that I was scheduled to pick my courses I was working as a poll clerk in the national elections (I’m Canadian in case you were wondering) and as a result I was unable to pick my courses myself. So I did the next best thing which was to teach my mother how to sign on to my account and pick my courses for me. In retrospect this was a terrible idea, since she didn’t know how to access the internet let alone where to type in the URL once on the internet. Nevertheless, I ignored these facts and insisted that she was ready when the day came along. When I got home that night I logged on to make sure that I had been properly registered in all my courses and surprise, surprise I hadn’t been registered in any of my courses. I have nobody to blame for that but myself. Fortunately, I was able to get into most of my desired courses except my biology course. At this point I reasoned that since I didn’t get my preferred course why not take a bird biology course and have more free time during the year. So I asked my friends for an easy biology course and then enrolled in it.

Second semester eventually came along and with it the start of this course. At the beginning, the course was going very well. I got an 85 on the first test and I felt I was on my was to an easy 4.0. When the second test came around I was expecting something of comparable difficulty to the first test but what I didn’t know was that it was the T.A that had written the test and not the professor. I barely escaped with a 70 but I was starting to feel my 4.0 slipping away from me. By the time the exam came around I needed to get a 92 on the exam to get my 4.0. Unfortunately, my exam schedule that year was terrible and the exam for this biology course was the last of three consecutive exams. As a result of that, I wasn’t able to prepare for the exam as well as I would have wanted. Being the optimistic person that I am, I still thought a 92 was possible since the exam was all multiple choice. Now I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but I sincerely hope not because it is not fun. I opened my exam read the first question and realized that I had no Idea what it was asking, so being optimistic, I told myself that it’s just one question and that I will have more luck with the second question. By the time I reached the end of the second page there wasn’t a single question asking ANYTHING that I recognized. By this time I legitimately thought I was going to fail this exam and this course so I said a serious prayer asking God to have mercy on me. Needless to say, I walked out of that exam defeated. About a week or so later my professor uploaded the marks for the exam and I have to be honest with you guys I have never been so happy to see a 52 before in my life! This gave me a final mark of 68 in the course, which is ironic considering I took the course to boost my GPA and instead had it lowered… considerably. The moral of the story: work hard no matter the course or at the very least pick your bird courses carefully! Next time I’ll give you guys some tips that I have gathered since this incident as to how to better pick a bird course since I know ya’ll are dying to know :p

Hope you guys found this helpful!