As winter sets in, the end of the semester draws near. Many students are able to start kicking back and just relaxing, but for others, this is a critical time for ensuring success for the rest of the year. Whether it’s for fulfilling graduation requirements, or pulling up their GPA, many students swarm to the counseling office to change their schedule for hopefully the better.

Counsellor Adolfo Hinojosa offered his insight on the midyear rush, advising against people trying to switch into year long classes like foreign languages, or engineering. He also suggested that if you needed to make a schedule change, it would be better to do it sooner rather than later. According to Hinojosa, most of the semester classes like P.E., art, and culinary basics are filling up fast.

Many AP students around this time of year are also considering the switch out, whether the class wasn’t what they expected or was negatively impacting their grade, everyone’s reasons are different. One student, who wishes to remain anonymous said “I’m thinking about switching out of (their class) but I’m afraid that if I don’t show back up second semester, people will judge me.” This is a common sentiment of many students, but the benefits of realizing when a certain class just isn’t for you far outweigh the fear of being judged. And on that matter, at least in my experience, no one actually judges the people who elect not to continue the class.

A second student, who also wanted to remain anonymous, said “I went into (this class) with a certain expectation of what we were going to be learning, and what we would be doing, but it’s totally different. I’m going to try and tough out second semester, and switch out if things get worse.” If a class isn’t working out, the advice Hinojosa gave was to switch sooner rather than later. It’s much easier for everyone if the change happens before the semester starts, and you’re more likely to get the class you want as well.

The final thing Hinojosa wanted students to know, was to be patient with the counseling staff. “It might not work right away, but we’ll do our best to make it happen.”