Reading last week’s Nexus editorial (“Once-Enthusiastic Student Questions Integrity of College Honors Program,” Daily Nexus, Jan. 21), I was embarrassed, to say the least, of one of my peers. As a fellow English major, honors student and Gaucho, it’s disheartening to see yet another stressed student resort to complaining.

I’m sorry if the current budget crisis is affecting the editorialist’s “smarty-pants bragging rights,” but it seems to me that a few of us are in need of readjusting our perspective as to what’s going on here at UCSB. The UC budget has been continually slashed, professors are overworked and class space is rarer than whatever the humans were searching for in “Avatar.” Amid all this stress, I’m afraid we aren’t seeing the larger picture here: Although Miss Hlebo was unable to attend, there was an honors section for her Music 15 lecture. Unless the professor has a vendetta against one out of the 4,587 incoming freshmen students, I’m weary of our editorialist reading the situation as a personal attack.

Fortunately for her and other frustrated students, there is hope. The honors program — for me, at least — has been understanding of unusual circumstances. One can make up the missed honors units at a later point — I’ve known honors students to take up to 12 honors units in one quarter alone — and, generally, honors contracts for upper-division courses are easier to coordinate than honors sections. It’s not a “sacrifice … of time and money” as Hlebo depicts it to be; one just needs to be proactive.

Lastly, I’d suggest taking Comparative Literature 30C: Major Works in European Literature with professor Derwin. The class and professor are amazing, there’s an honors section listed on GOLD and, as an English major, it would probably be accepted as a petitioned lower-division elective.