By Shaye-Love Salcedo

Disclaimer: This piece is meant to make you laugh about the situation, not to stress you out more. If you actually need to drop a class, please talk to your academic advisor—not me.

Let’s get this out of the way first: yes, you absolutely chose the wrong elective. You knew it deep down when you clicked “enroll” on that course at 2 a.m. back in August but you told yourself you were being “spontaneous” and “expanding your horizons.” It was a nice idea—except now your horizon is a 20-page research paper on an obscure topic you can’t even pronounce.

Don’t lie. You thought you were being adventurous when you signed up—now you’re trapped in a class you hate, Googling “how to drop without academic penalty” at 3 a.m. Every time you open the syllabus, you have to physically stop yourself from dry-heaving. 

“How hard can it be to write about my feelings?”

Sure, your professor seems nice,  but also suspiciously passionate about their subject—which is unfortunate for you, since you signed up for “Astronomy for Non-Majors” thinking it would be about looking at pretty stars, not learning the math behind the expansion rate of the universe.

Maybe you thought you were choosing the easy route. “‘Creative Writing’ will be fun,” you told yourself. “How hard can it be to write about my feelings?” Except now you’re three weeks behind on a 10-page short story that must be “literary” and “reflect an understanding of narrative structure.” Your protagonist is still
named “Protagonist.”

Or maybe you went the other direction—“Intro to Microeconomics” seemed responsible, mature, resume-friendly. However, every time you look at a supply-and-demand curve, your brain shuts down like a Windows XP computer running 17 programs at once. You are actively praying for inflation to disappear just so you don’t have to learn about it anymore.

And let’s be honest: some of you went rogue. You took “Philosophy of Death” or “History of Witchcraft,” thinking you’d be mysterious and intellectual. Now you’re sitting in a dark lecture hall listening to your professor ask whether you have truly accepted your own mortality. You’re probably thinking, “Actually, no. I have not, and I would like to drop this class immediately.”

Here’s the thing: everyone thinks they chose the wrong elective. That’s how electives work. If you chose the “right” one, it would feel suspiciously like a major requirement, and then you wouldn’t get to complain about it with your friends over iced coffee. The misery is part of the experience—you get a free existential crisis and a niche area of expertise you will never use again.

“Actually, no, I have not, and I would like to drop this class immediately”

But it’s okay, this is a rite of passage. In five years, you’ll be at some party, and someone will casually mention urban planning or medieval literature, and you’ll light up like a beacon.

You’ll say, “Actually, I took a class on that,” and proceed to explain it in excruciating detail while everyone else zones out. That’s the real purpose of electives: to turn you into an unbearable know-it-all about one oddly specific topic.

So yes, you chose the wrong elective. You will hate every second of it, and you will complain endlessly and you will probably get a worse grade than you expected. But at least now you know better for next semester—until you sign up for something equally bad because it fits your schedule.