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This article is written for every university student trying to “lighten” their course load for whatever reason. Universities vary, some are small, but some like mine have a population of a city. So having that said, some of these suggestions work better in some places than others. My intention is to share ideas that you can build on depending on your specific situation. Enjoy!

Pick a course based on what you’re good at. Think of the subjects you destroyed in high school and look them up in the course list. Try to find a course description that best resembles what you did in that high school course. Needless to explain, if you did well, then perhaps you have a talent for the subject. However, the important thing to understand is there are lots of reasons why you might have done well in a high school course. It could be help from friends, an easy teacher, lots of spare time, or really basic concepts. Therefore this suggestion, while seeming highly encouraging should be approached carefully and given less weight than the following points.

Pick the courses you’re interested in. In every course there are plenty of students who do well and plenty of students who do badly. I’ve seen students get brutal marks in several courses that I had slept through and got a 4.0. If you take a course that bores you, it will be highly unmotivating and hard to study for it. Without interest, you might even do badly in a course you’ve previously had lots of success. Bottom line, this isn’t high school anymore; even easy courses require more motivation and even more hard work for a student to succeed in them.

Pick the courses with few (if any) prerequisites. The easiest courses are often those that expect no previous knowledge, such as most first year courses and plenty upper year courses too. Beware the first year science courses since most of them require/recommend students to take the grade 12 version as a prerequisite. The reasoning for this is simple. There is no dependence on previous knowledge, knowledge that you might have missed in the previous year or otherwise forgotten. Also the non-prerequisite courses have longer introductions. The professor explains the field, explains the issues surrounding it, and then starts talking about the most basic of the ideas. By contrast, my first year chemistry course started with three chapters the first day and I believe two more the next class, not a very basic and simple introduction indeed. We did about a thousand pages of our chemistry textbook in a single semester (half a year). It was tough for those who took grade 12 chemistry, let alone for those who didn’t.

Pick a course by its professor. Don’t go too far out of your way to take a course that may be difficult and not interesting just because you enjoy the professor teaching it. It could however be an advantage. Beyond the fact that the professor is probably a good teacher, the professor may be speaking on the same “wavelength” as you. I’ve had a professor that I liked but he was hated by everyone else; I guess he was somehow able to get to me better than others. Some professors also are very easy with marks, but beware, for some courses it might be different. Lastly you already have experience with the professor and understand what sort of things he expects and how his tests are made.

See what other people think. My goal is to eventually post an article on the best ways to do this, but for now I present you an abbreviated version. First off, talk to your friends, even those with interest very different fields. Your friends know a lot more than you think, so talk to them; they have their own experiences to share plus the information their own friends told them. Also check social networking websites like Facebook. Look in the forums section. The bigger your university likely the more you’ll find there. One important thing to keep in mind is this suggestion should be giving you ideas and shouldn’t be the sole reason you’re taking the course. What’s easy for one person could be incredibly hard for another.