On paper, choosing courses is perhaps the most uninteresting start to your university career. But to underestimate the complexity and the grueling work of finding a course that compliments the rest of your semester is like trying to find a substitute for cream cheese in a recipe for a classic New York cheesecake.  It might pass as a one man job, but it’s made to feel impossible. 

 

I started thinking of picking out my courses as if I was shopping on craigslist. Instead of shooting a direct message to the seller asking, “is this really a size medium”, I had dug myself into a hole with a shovel made of dubiety. Are they really offering what it says right here in the course bio? How similar is this course to the one I just took last semester? I couldn’t just pester the course coordinator and bombard them with a bunch of questions they wouldn’t have the answer to, that would be way above their pay grade. Skepticism became my modus operandi.

 

HKU houses 10 faculties that offer approximately 60 bachelor degrees within all the different schools. To quantify the number of courses that get cycled year-in and year-out would be a military sized task. The University boasts a brilliant staff, top-tier education, and a glorious ‘rooted-in-tradition’ reputation exemplified by the stubbornly archaic HKUportal. In any case, the courses the university can offer are plentiful, so much so that sometimes they are buried amongst each other. Then, there are the courses that are compulsory but are only offered at a specific time. 9 times out of 10, amongst those courses that can be used to fulfill that requirement, you really only have your eyes on one. So, in order to time everything right, you kind of have to play battleship with add/drop.

 

Sure, each course has its own charm, but not every popular elective is popular for the same reason.  I want to believe that it isn’t too hard to compile a thoroughly catered semester for each year of study, but I need everyone’s cooperation here. 

 

As you might know, there’s a little bit of planning that comes with every undergraduate degree, one semester is enough to light a small fire under your seat and get you thinking about how you should plan accordingly. Some courses have ugly workload rumours which students have learned not to pair with similarly heavy workload courses in order to manage their time to the best of their ability. To me, this is just a good work ethic. A student shouldn’t have to feel apologetic for wanting to know how heavy the workload is, what kind of courses would compliment another course, the weightage of the assignments, and the content of the course. The same is true for a student who’s curious about how the professor might grade or teach.  

 

The information needed to make a sound decision over a course should be just as abundant as the number of students who take these courses, so why isn’t it?

 

I’ve heard legends, myths, from a time before I enrolled into HKU when there was such a place. They refer to the missed server as ‘Triklo’, a whole library of online student course reviews dedicated to the truth. I couldn’t find much information on it, but from what I’ve heard it was a saving grace to the students before us. I’ve scoured the documents but the scripture has nothing on its origins, or how it died. Rumours have it that it was too full with knowledge that the server couldn’t handle the fame and burnt out like most stars in their prime, but it could be heresy for all I know. 

 

Now all we’ve got is RegCourse. A non-profit platform with multiple universities listed for review – kind of like Openrice, but with only 0.1/1000th the number of restaurants. The courses with the most reviews are popular Common Core courses that usually pick up an average class size of 150-300 students each semester. It’s much harder to find a course that yields fewer students, or one that is more specific to your major. The argument isn’t in how obscure the course itself might be, because I know for a fact that students have definitely taken this course, they just chose not to write about it. So, in order to fast-track our course selections, I want to bring back the former glory of the late server and imbue it’s spirit into RegCourse. I’m not looking for scathing reviews akin to hate speech or overly warm prose, I just want an unfiltered account of how you really felt about your learning experience here. If it’s just average, and there’s nothing new – it’s still valuable to me. To be completely honest, I want to know how you fared in this course so that I can make a judgement on how well I would fare in this course. Selfish? 100%. But I’m looking out for you too, and together we can birth a generation that doesn’t panic a week before add/drop, because we’ll have fought in the trenches for them.  

 

So from here on out, remember: just write a review. 50-100 words? Go for it. You could write an essay if you have a lot to say, I’ll read it. I’ll be here, sitting, waiting, wishing on your reviews.

​

​