What does "shopping day" mean to you? I admit, I had never heard of it prior to Fletcher. I was used to committing to a selection of courses at the start of each semester and dropping only the most disagreeable classes. I like the concept: a professor's short synopsis of the class is a great way to find what you like without sitting through hours of lecture waiting for it to get good. I only got confused when I saw how this concept met reality. I noticed that not all classes were available for shopping, and that (despite the shopping option) some of my fellow students were still attending five or six classes well into the second week of the term.

In search of the truth, I went to the shopping guru: Carol Murphy, in the Office of the Registrar. Murphy creates the shopping schedule each semester and explains her goal: to provide shopping day periods for "all new courses, all seminars, and any classes taught by new faculty or adjunct professors." She added that, "based on suggestions from the student council, we have offered a shopping day for the last three years." The idea was initially focused on seminars because of their once-a-week meeting schedule (to sit in on two competing seminars would take two weeks and result in at least one missed seminar class).

Fletcher does not attempt to do shopping days for all classes, like Harvard does. Instead, the Fletcher schedule is designed with the thought that students will sit through the full period of some of the twice-weekly classes to make up their minds. This term, 32 classes were offered during shopping day (including all but two of the seminars), which included 80 percent of ILO courses,53 percent of DHP courses and 53 percent of EIB courses.

Shopping helps many students refine their choices, but often students just have to sit through some of the full-length classes to decide. Kevin Newman (MALD '01) started his first week attending 18 classes, began his second week with eight and will enter the third week with six. He will end up with four, but feels that "to get a sense of the class, it sometimes only happens once the teaching is in full swing."

Personally, my biggest shopping resource is the wisdom and experience of fellow students. I review the course descriptions and bounce my ideas for "finalists" off second-year students, trimming the remainder during the shopping day itself. Others use the course critiques in the library to make their choices easier and their lives saner.

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