Faith Talamantez / Daily Nexus

After wasting their first quarter at UC Santa Barbara taking Online Walking, many students are realizing that major requirement classes are hard to come by. To combat this widespread problem and the outrage of the student body, UC Santa Barbara has announced the introduction of a new academic track to accommodate the shortage of available classes and the need for a well-rounded education. 

This new program will add an additional six years to students’ graduation track, as the credits do not actually count towards any major or gen ed requirements. 

Students will be able to take courses such as Spaghetti Making, Intro to Fish Podiatry, The Art of an Instagram Caption, Intro to Raving and How to Get Into a Frat Party 101. These classes have been introduced as part of the Speciality Program for Encouraging Redundant Majors (S.P.E.R.M.), a program which seeks to offer more alternatives to major classes, given the competitive nature of trying to get such classes at UCSB. 

A few students such as Jonah Stratman, a current seventh-year biology major who is number 13,078 on a waitlist for his last pre-major class, disagree with the direction UCSB has gone. “I feel like they could’ve just started making the lectures bigger, or multiple professors could’ve taught the same course during the same quarter, but who cares what I think.” 

Anna Ortiz, a fifth-year student who still has four more major courses to complete, reflects on this new program: “I’m a geology major, but I have to take the Art of Lava Caking and Analyzing the Layers of Tiramisu because they were the only classes available that are even slightly related to my major. It was these classes or The Physiology of the Frat Flick, so … yeah. Here for another few years, I guess.” 

Some students have bitterly acknowledged that UCSB has really benefited from this situation, such as Cole Price, a sixth-year political science major currently enrolled in Analyzing the Social Movement of Sarah J. Maas and How To Approach Girls for the Creepy Male. “I mean, you gotta admire the ingenuity of the plan. They’re making bank off all these students who can’t graduate, so why would they add more POL S 1 classes if they can add classes like The Art of Collaging for the Unartistic and prevent a few hundred people from meeting all their requirements? If I were a billion-dollar industry, I would do the same thing.” 

In the wake of this new policy, professors have noticed an influx of students crashing their courses at the beginning of each quarter. Professor Clarkson of the English department, who has also begun to teach Dyslexic Poetry, weighs in, “There’s a new look of desperation in these kids’ eyes. They come up to me all the time to ask what the drop rate of my classes are and how much money they would need to pay me for my course add code. It’s a little disconcerting, but that’s the world we live in now, I suppose.”

Students at UCSB will protest the lack of relevant classes offered by the university this coming week, with the hope that the school will stop trying to take advantage of them and the shortage of available spaces in many major classes.

A sixth-year chemistry major who wished to remain anonymous describes the mindset of these protestors. “We just want to get our education and leave. We don’t understand why they’re offering all these ridiculous filler classes when the solution is just adding more spaces in lectures. We’re tired of paying more for longer, because the school is greedy. We deserve better.”

 

Serrano Ham is currently trying to decide between taking Lego Architecture or Storke Tower Chime Composition.

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