 Add Accreditation, Drop Desperation!
As y'all may or may not be aware, add and dropping procedures are, as of last Friday, over. This means the instructors can enjoy finalized roll sheets and we, the students, have a somewhat more stable schedule. Classes are now in full swing and once again we ignore that very fundamental question common to all registrational rituals and that is: "Why?"
Registration is a word derived from Latin, meaning to record or to enter. In the context of our lives at Bilkent, it means working with a (now functioning) computer program. If I'm not mistaken in the assumption, the mechanization of the registration procedure was done so there wouldn't be long queues in front of offices, and people could go out and make snow angels instead. I should also add, in all sincerity, that this was the smoothest registration I went through in my whole Bilkent experience. I only waited for about an hour or so, wasted not more than a few grams of paper and only lost a few brain cells worrying if I would get the classes I wanted. This is a vast improvement over last spring when I didn't even know which department I was in until the first day of classes. I would say that I am lucky considering I'm in a department of only a few hundred people in total. I heard some students had to set up tents in front of the offices to make it a more enjoyable time while waiting for their turns to hand in the override forms.
One thing I still fail to understand, even after spending all these years as a student in Turkey, is why the Ministry of Education is so darn kind to us. We never have to worry about what class to take - not in high school, not even in college! What some curriculum methods would refer to as self determination in education, we in Turkey dismiss as an inconvenient notion. Place the control in the hand of the child? Ridiculous! Through state determined curriculums, every citizen is granted the same education and harmony is achieved.
My fellow Bilkenters, are we even the slightest bit aware of how free we are? You see, by not choosing which classes we will take, we are spared the responsibility of determining our field of interests and our future. We are, after all, mere children who do not possess the maturity, the mental capacity, or the common sense to form our own study plan. I'm pretty sure no one would graduate if they were simply given general guidelines on what courses to take. Someone has to check on us, be it the administrative staff in high school or our advisors in college, and enroll us in our courses to make sure we're subject to a sufficient supply of serendipity - just like a mother who wraps up her baby in a swaddle and then gently places him in a cradle. How sweet.
For a moment, I tried to imagine the chaos that would most definitely take place if everyone just got the classes they wanted and not the classes they needed. There would be engineers in acting classes and - *gasp* - literature students in genetics labs! Surely it would be an utter disaster to allow students to drop courses at their discretion, even if they didn't feel the need for that course, or none of the administrators could find decent grounds to justify it. As Yakov Smirnoff would say in this matter; In U.S you choose classes, in Turkey classes choose you!
Onur Çelik (AMER/II)
o_celik@ug.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr
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