Four years. Then you’re out. On your own in the real word.
College is a transformative journey, often said to be the best four years
of one’s life — a time for opening your mind to new ideas, pursuing
passions, and a time for self-discovery. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime
experience, but it’s only four years, and if you spend any longer, the
tuition will leave your pocketbook beyond empty. So how do you make the
most of your four years in college without staying longer?
Four year plans are a tool that students use to map out their journey at
UCSD by planning coursework. Easier said than done. When students are
presented with a long list of major(s) requirements, minor(s)
requirements, general education requirements, and university-wide
requirements, how do students juggle it all? How do they know which
courses to take and when to take them? If they don’t figure it out soon,
they might find themselves with an additional fifth year of school and a
large student-debt.
When our group discussed our own four year plans, we discovered that many of us have frustrations with making and executing our four year plans. But we weren’t alone. When we interviewed our peers throughout the next week, we found that our classmates experienced many of the same frustrations and other issues that we hadn’t considered. Some students pointed out the scarcity of academic advisors available, the needless hassle in altering a four year plan, and the difficulty of navigating through a labyrinth of prerequisite courses. These, along with lots of other difficulties, lead us to hypothesize that students at UCSD have trouble mapping out their four year plan.
In order to explore this hypothesis, we’ve made it our goal to obtain
quantitative data to supplement the qualitative data we’ve already
uncovered. At our next class meeting, we’ll survey our classmates about
their four year plans. Then we’ll refine our survey questions and send out
a finalized survey via email — this online survey will allow us to obtain
data from a larger range of students in all majors. Hopefully, this will
give us not only a better understanding of this problem space, but how it
can be improved upon as well.
