(Originally, I wasn’t going to post this. It was a “private diary” type of post and maybe TMI. But after reading the story on CNN, I decided that it actually wasn’t that bad.)
That is my mantra this time of year – during preregistration and registration. I used to keep a close eye on the preregistration numbers and would get a secret, naughty thrill when I saw that my classes were more popular than my colleagues. No matter that physics or the genetics lab was being offered at the same time as their sections. Ask me any time during advising and I could tell you within one student what the preregistration numbers were.
I would tell my colleagues that I was just concerned about student distributions or if we had enough people to cover all of the labs or if we needed to offer an overload section. But in reality, it made me feel good to know that my classes were filling up first.
Now that I’m no longer the new kid on the block (even if the new, young prof teaches a different area of chemistry), the glamour is gone. My classes fill up at the same rate as everyone else’s. I tell myself that I check the pre-enrollment numbers only to make sure that we’ll have enough students to offer a class and keep our adjunct. But in reality it does sting a little bit.
But then I read this story on CNN about defriending and your “digital ego.”
Experts say rejection on social networks can hurt worse than an in-person snub because people are usually more polite face-to-face than they are online.
After reading this, I decided that it was OK that I feel bad about the registration numbers. I don’t have a digital ego. I don’t know how many friends I have on Facebook and if people defriended me, I would only wonder why they friended me in the first place. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone. If you’re reading this, then yes, I would be quite upset if you defriended me.) So my “real life” ego has to make up for the lack of digital ego.
But I’m getting over it. Now that I’m older and wiser(?), I check the numbers and actually get excited when I see that my lab has fewer people in it – LESS GRADING!
