With the add/drop deadline just around the corner, many Stanford students are stressed about which classes to keep taking and which to give up on for the next seven weeks. Some students confidently load themselves with a schedule that will probably knock them out harder than Floyd Mayweather Jr. on copious amounts of anabolic steroids. Others prefer to take it easy, valuing good sleep, a social life and overall sanity. Strug Ling ’24 has taken an interesting approach towards deciding on his schedule for the remainder of winter quarter: enrolling in 20 one-unit wonders.
For those who only bother to take five-unit STEM classes and deem all other courses useless, one-unit wonders are introductory classes intended to expose students to a certain field. They are often taught in the form of seminars, faculty panels or private lessons, and they typically meet once a week. The majority of them are graded on a pass/fail basis, however it’s pretty difficult to not receive credit unless you find it extremely challenging to look at a screen for an hour and type one sentence in the zoom chat (if participation is even required). Many Stanford students opt to add at least one or two of these low-stress classes to their schedule as a way to find their undiscovered interests.
However, Ling has taken things a couple steps further by filling his entire schedule with one-unit wonders. Ling felt that it was the right decision to make after a taxing fall quarter of completing CS 106C, MATH 51,000 and the highly exclusive PHYSICS 80 series. Although he had originally planned on taking THINK, PWR and CS 106D during winter quarter, Ling had a last-minute change of heart upon realizing that he forgot to do every assignment over the first two weeks. After a one-day test run of his new and revamped course load, Ling stated:
“It’s pretty great. I get to meet so many different people in each of my classes and tell them that I’m taking 20 units, when in reality I spend most of my time playing Candy Crush and watching paint dry. No one ever really asks how many units I’m taking, but I know how much they care about my seemingly heavy course load!”
With some time left to switch classes, Ling is encouraging many of his friends to do the same.
Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
Contact Lorenzo Del Rosario at lorenzak ‘at’ stanford.edu.