A New Shopping Experience

We have just finished two days of "shopping" for classes. This is a massive exercise whereby the whole student body moves from class to class for half the normal lesson time, so that we can decide upon what courses to take. Lecturers will essentially give the same introductory spiel twice, once for the first half of the lesson and again during the second half. Of course, people will attend far more shopping sessions than is necessary so as to get a better sense of what courses suit them or which lecturers suit them, to find out more about a particular programme or just because they have some free time and nothing better to do. Basically there are a few categories of courses -

• Courses taught by "big name" professors, like Ronald Heifetz (leadership), Robert Lawrence (international trade), Joseph Nye (International Relations) and so on.
• "classic" KSG courses - like the strategic management course above or "Reasoning from History" which apparently has been run ever since the beginning of KSG.
• Niche courses, like "Economics of Immigration" or "Introduction to the Non-Profit Sector".
• Skills-related courses like "Arts of Communication", "Negotiation Skills"
  

The most popular would of course be the first two. These courses are packed, with people sitting in the aisles and standing at the back. KSG students have a certain number of points they can use to bid for the courses which are oversubscribed; the trick for them is to have a good mix of courses which are popular/oversubscribed and the less popular courses which may suit their niche interests. For us, we have to get the lecturers’ permission to sit in their class which may be difficult if it goes to bidding.

As for the lecturers, they conduct the shopping sessions differently. Some talk about how they don't believe in shopping and treat the students to the first introductory class of the course. Others just treat it as a logistics session and a few try and do a bit of both. Some are very formal, and others fairly relaxed in their lecture styles. Some come in suits and others in old woolly waistcoats. One particular lecturer, for "Strategic Management for Public Purposes" looks, sounds and even uses the same phrases as my lecturer on the equivalent course in Singapore! Of course, since it is a similar course, they are using the same cases and more or less the same textbooks. So of course I am not doing this programme.

What am I looking for? One course is already selected for us (ethics). The rest – criteria would be quality of the lecturer, workload (of course), level of interest in the course content. I don’t think that the subject matter is too important but of course there should be a balance between content-type and management-type courses. Fortunately, only one of the courses I want to attend requires bidding. And I have an alternative selected in case that doesn’t work out. The only problem is the alternative is the same time as the first choice course :0

Are American students extremely vocal, do hands pop up at every opportunity? Well, they are certainly more vocal than Singaporean students but it is not impossible to get a word in. Just takes persistence and sitting in a good spot where the speaker can see you :-)