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Shopping Period: Looking For a Bargain

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"With the amount of money I pay for tuition, I think student choice is very important," Fung says.

"It's really helpful to have the opportunity to investigate some of the classes and see how the professor runs his lecture," says Amy L. Mecklenburg '98.

"It's a hard way to go into the semester. In one of my classes there was one hundred pages of reading, but I couldn't get the sourcebook," she adds. "But it's worth it because it gets rid of all the paperwork, and add-drop forms, there would otherwise be."

Students emphasize that they use shopping period mainly to weed out classes they dislike or trim their lists of classes down to four, rather than to find classes they hadn't considered based on their descriptions in the course catalogue.

"I really like shopping period because it lets you find out which classes are boring," says Steven R. Hill '98. "I also think the lectures the professors give are the most inspirational."

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"I think shopping period is something unique that a lot of my friends don't have," says Shane C. Mangrum '97. "My list Monday included six classes. I shopped two classes that I had to choose between."

Some students say they came to Harvard this semester knowing only one class they were sure they would take.

"I just knew I was going to take a government sophomore tutorial," Hill says.

And as their choices shifted, most students say the hassle of not being able to buy or to find sourcebooks until the second or third week of classes is not too troubling.

Others say they find shopping particularly useful for choosing Core courses.

"Shopping is a useful tool, since the courses are forced upon you," one Eliot junior says. "Packed classes aren't really a big deal, and running out of books is not really a problem."

Despite this praise for shopping period, a handful of students say they do not shop classes.

"I've never shopped classes," Andy J. Liu '96 says. "I take classes for the subject matter, which I can tell pretty well by the course descriptions."

Liu says that he doesn't mind the present system, however.

"I've never been inconvenienced by shopping period," he says.Shop 'til You Drop Students want to buy sourcebooks, which often sell out during shopping period.

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