Category: Students

Action Research at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm

Turning the soil in the Farm's west planting beds, 24 April 2013
Turning the soil in the Farm’s west planting beds, 24 April 2013

Many of the writing and research assignments I give my students at RU are fairly straightforward and prescriptive. I give them a lot of concrete guidelines and freedom to choose a topic; they crank out the work; and then I grade it and give it back with feedback. That’s how it works for the most part in academia.

But the past two springs I’ve had the privilege of teaching a service-learning course held on-site at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm, at the south end of the Cabrini-Green neighborhood on Chicago’s Near North Side — and that class is anything but ordinary.

Buidling new planting beds for the community garden, 1May 2013
Buidling new planting beds for the community garden, 1May 2013

SUST 350 Service & Sustainability has been supported these last two years by a “transformational service learning” grant from Roosevelt’s Mansfield Institute of Social Justice and Transformation, funding which has enabled my students and me to support the farm’s mission, purchase supplies for construction projects, and take area youth on educational field trips within and beyond Chicago.

This spring semester, in addition to their weekly work on the farm watering plants, building compost bins, turning over soil, constructing greenhouse grow tables, etc., my 15 undergrad students were tasked with a collaborative “Action Research” project, in which they’d work in pairs or trios to develop real-world projects meant to extend and enhance the mission and work of this extraordinary half-acre urban farm.

Having never led quite such a research project before, I wasn’t exactly sure how to instruct them in this process — consequently, I just didn’t have the procedure or the finished project all scripted out like I usually do. Instead, I offered some rough guidelines (see project guidelines here [pdf]), moral and logistical support (likewise provided by the farm’s director, Natasha Holbert), and a lot of room for creativity.

Boy, did I learn something. Give motivated, smart, and engaged students a chance to do creative applied research for a place that they respect and appreciate, and they are capable of doing terrific work. (Note to self: do this again.) Here’s what they came up with. All of these Action Research Projects are designed to be implemented, expanded, and/or revised by the Farm staff and workers — and some may be taken up and extended by future SUST 350 students here at Roosevelt.

Our last workday, 1 May 2013, at the farm. Pictured here are RU students, CLUF staff, and Growing Power / Chicago Lights "Youth Corps" interns.
Our last workday, 1 May 2013, at the farm. Pictured here are RU students, CLUF staff, and Growing Power / Chicago Lights “Youth Corps” interns.

Community Empowerment and Youth Enrichment (CEYE) Program
Allison Breeding, Scott Rogers, and Troy Withers

The CEYE Program is comprised of three branches—Community Service, Food Access and Engagement, and Roosevelt Credit—which collectively aim to benefit the lives and futures of Chicago Lights Urban Farm (CLUF) volunteers, at-risk urban youths, and Cabrini seniors. CEYE seeks to take teens out of a path of trouble and into a path of service, volunteerism, and eventually college and career. The program also seeks to empower and assist local seniors by improving their food access and strengthening their community connections. (CEYE Proposal pdf)

Community Gardeners’ Guide
Jordan Ewbank, Kristen Johnson, and Ana Molledo

A practical how-to resource for people wishing to start their own community garden, based on the knowledge and practices of the CLUF community garden, established in 2002. Discusses land preparation, garden organization and design, raised beds vs. in-ground gardening, soil quality, compost, and what kinds of vegetables to grow. (Gardeners’ Guide pdf)

Troy and his son, working together on our 24 April 2013 workday
Troy and his son, working together on our 24 April 2013 workday

Farm Education Lessons and Activities
Bob Basile, Christian Cameron, and Molly Connor

Educational lessons and activities for K through Grade 6 students on composting, planting, and nutrition meant to be used at the CLUF to connect urban farm education with sustainability. May be expanded by future students for 7-12 grade levels on these and additional topics. (Farm Curriculum pdf)

Knowing Your Neighborhood: Community Assets Brochure and Map
Mike Miller and Ken Schmidt

Brochure (pdf)and interactive Google map designed to highlight resources and assets with a one-mile radius of the Chicago Lights Urban Farm.

Rainwater Harvesting Plan
Michael Magdongon and Lore Mmutle

A concrete proposal for the installation of a rainwater harvesting system on one of the Farm’s hoop houses. Would provide a sustainable supply of water to decrease dependence upon usage of the street hydrant on Chicago Ave., now the Farm’s main water source. Projected return on investment within one year.
(Rainwater Proposal pdf)

Self-Guided Tour and Farm Map
Bryan McAlister and Lauren Winkler

This beautifully designed one-page, double-sided guided tour information sheet and map is ideal for first-time visitors to the Farm who would like a brief and fun introduction to all of the spaces and growing areas within its half-acre footprint. Includes information of selected vegetables and several recipes for cooking them.
(Guided Tour and Map Brochure pdf)

350 Self-Guided Tour Map _Page_2

College Graduates and Employment Prospects

As thousands of college students graduate this month, including our students here at Roosevelt, many are concerned how they will fare in the current job market. And that market continues to be challenging as we slowly recover from the Great Recession of 2008-2010.

Recent news, however, show that the economy is adding new jobs (albeit not quite at the rate one would like to see this far into the economic recovery; and this 5 May 2013 report from the New York Times illustrates how much better off college graduates are in terms of employment levels than those who have some college but no degree, or no college at all. For workers without a high school diploma, employment prospects are very tough indeed, unlike in decades past when the US economy sported an abundance of unskilled labor positions. As the news article notes:

The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was a mere 3.9 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for the work force as a whole, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. Even when the jobless rate for college graduates was at its very worst in this business cycle, in November 2010, it was still just 5.1 percent. That is close to the jobless rate the rest of the work force experiences when the economy is good.

Among all segments of workers sorted by educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started.

The number of college-educated workers with jobs has risen by 9.1 percent since the beginning of the recession. Those with a high school diploma and no further education are practically a mirror image, with employment down 9 percent on net. For workers without even a high school diploma, employment levels have fallen 14.1 percent.

The news is not all good here, as the article raises an important point about what sort of jobs college grads have been taking.

But just because college graduates have jobs does not mean they all have “good” jobs.

There is ample evidence that employers are hiring college-educated workers for jobs that do not actually require college-level skills — positions like receptionists, file clerks, waitresses, car rental agents and so on.

“High-skilled people can take the jobs of middle-skilled people, and middle-skilled people can take jobs of low-skilled people,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. “And low-skilled people are out of luck.”

In some cases, employers are specifically requiring four-year degrees for jobs that previously did not need them, since companies realize that in a relatively poor job market college graduates will be willing to take whatever they can find.

Does this mean that the cost a four-year college degree is not a good investment anymore? Decidedly not, whether one takes the short-view (immediate employment prospects in a difficult job market) or the long-view (return on investment over one’s lifetime). College grads have a marked advantage either way. As the article continues to note:

The median weekly earnings of college-educated, full-time workers — like those for their counterparts with less education — have dipped in recent years. In 2012, the weekly median was $1,141, compared with $1,163 in 2007, after adjusting for inflation. The premium they earn for having that college degree is still high, though.

In 2012, the typical full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree earned 79 percent more than a similar full-time worker with no more than a high school diploma. For comparison, 20 years earlier the premium was 73 percent, and 30 years earlier it was 48 percent.

And since a higher percentage of college graduates than high school graduates are employed in full-time work, these figures actually understate the increase in the total earnings premium from college completion, said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an independent research organization.

So, despite the painful upfront cost, the return on investment on a college degree remains high. An analysis from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington estimated that the benefits of a four-year college degree were equivalent to an investment that returns 15.2 percent a year, even after factoring in the earnings students forgo while in school.

Today’s graduates will need to aggressively and strategically seek employment opportunities, to be sure; and they may have to settle for a less-than-optimal job or internship the first time around. But they’re still in a far better position than their less-educated peers to get gainful employment in their area of expertise, especially as the economy continues to recover.

Snow on the Ground, Water on the Mind

Last Saturday, Feb. 23, my SUST 220 Water students (both past and present) joined me at a wonderful annual event here in the Windy City: the Chicago River Student Congress, convened by the environmental conservation organization Friends of the Chicago River. This 2013 celebration of river conservation and environmental education was held at Marie Curie Metro High School on Chicago’s SW Side, and featured yours truly as the “special guest speaker,” a designation that made me proud and humble at the same time, for I still consider myself a student of rather than an expert about the Chicago River.

The Chicago River: Transformed, Exploited, and Abused — but Still Alive
Chicago River Student Congress Special Guest Presentation (pdf version)

SUST majors Ron Taylor, Angi Cornelius, and Ken Schmidt at the 2013 Congress
SUST majors Ron Taylor, Angi Cornelius, and Ken Schmidt at the 2013 Congress

Last year, I co-presented a workshop session on Water and Sustainability with then-SUST major (and now alum) Amanda Zeigler (BPS ’12); you can view a pdf of our slideshow from that 2012 workshop. This successful experience led me to recruit three students from my Fall 2012 Water class at Roosevelt to be fellow participants in this year’s Congress. The fact that my Fall and Spring Water classes this academic year are partnering with Friends of the Chicago River on a “Blueways to Green” environmental education grant made that prospect irresistible.

Former canoeing partners and classmates, Ron Taylor and Ken Schmidt — whose collective nickname “Ebony and Ivory” demonstrates the awesome power of the river to bring together people of all races, creeds, and colors — agreed to co-present a workshop with me entitled “Sustainability and the Chicago River: from Urbanization to Pollution to Restoration,” which we did twice during the course of the Congress (here’s the pdf of our slideshow (8MB file). Ron and Ken skillfully shifted back and forth in their presentation, and were able to elicit lots of dialogue from their audience member, mainly students from CPS high schools who have done environmental conservation and/or science projects on the river.

Meanwhile, roaming the halls of the Congress was fellow SUST major Angi Cornelius, another student from my Fall 2012 Water class, who indulged her theatrical side by dressing up as one of six “Super Villians” who represented ecological/social threats to the biodiversity and water quality of urban rivers. Angi’s character was “Z. Mussel” (the zebra mussel, naturally), an invasive bivalve species that she refashioned into the persona of a Russian femme fatale. Along with her fellow Villians, Angi worked the crowd throughout the morning by engaging students in small group conversations about the impact of invasive species on rivers, streams, and the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Students from my current section of SUST 220 Water met at the Congress for our 4th week of class and our 2nd field session of the semester. The Congress is a unique learning opportunity, as it features a wide variety of speakers and workshops — some by high school teachers and students; some by college profs and students; and a few by conservationists, environmental professionals, etc. — that provide attendees with science-based knowledge about the river’s history, ecology, present status, and future prospects.

For photos of the Congress, check out my annotated slideshow as well as this online album from the Friends of the Chicago River’s Facebook page.

Hiking the trail at Portage Woods; Joliet and Marquette were here about 340 years ago
Hiking the trail at Portage Woods; Joliet and Marquette were here about 340 years ago

Following the Congress and a quick sack lunch at the high school, during which we bade farewell to Ron, Ken, and Angi, my 220 scholars and I carpooled to a nearby Cook County Forest Preserve location that has profound historical and geographic significance to the city of Chicago, the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, and two of the great North American watersheds (those of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River). This is the Chicago Portage National Historic Site at 4800 S. Harlem Ave. in Lyons, one of only two National Historic Sites in the entire State of Illinois.

If the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s Stickney wastewater treatment plant just to the east is a supreme example of how we use technology and the built environment to control water as a resource (and deal with the problem of wastewater), the Chicago Portage is polar opposite kind of experience. Here we see the landscape much as it appeared to the 17th century explorers Louis Joliet and Pierre Marquette, when they crossed Mud Lake (now occupied by the Stickney WTP) between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, thus staking out a trade route between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Picking up trash from the shoreline of the Chicago River's South Turning Basin, at the mouth of Bubbly Creek
Picking up trash from the shoreline of the Chicago River’s South Turning Basin, at the mouth of Bubbly Creek

Our last stop of the day was further east on Interstate 55, where we exited north on Ashland Avenue and stopped at Canal Origins Park. This riverside parkland (and fishing spot) provides impressive views of the present-day juncture of the Chicago River’s South Branch and Bubbly Creek, and commemorates the origin of the historic I&M Canal, which was constructed from 1836 to 1848 and fulfilled Joliet’s dream of connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. Here, then, is a superb spot to talk about the history, ecology, and geography of the creeks and rivers which run through the city, as well as the industrial and wastewater treatment processes that have polluted these waters over the years.

At Canal Origins, we engaged in some good old-fashioned service learning, Roosevelt-style, by donning work gloves and picking up any litter/recyclables we came across. A recent blanket of snow concealed most of the litter in the upper part of the park, along the busy street. But down at the river line at the South Turning basin, where Bubbly Creek enters into the South Branch, lots of garbage and urban detritus presented itself for our labors.

Conor and Chris drag a heavy tire up the steep slope from the river's shoreline
Conor and Chris drag a heavy tire up the steep slope from the river’s shoreline

My students hurled themselves into this effort with purpose and enthusiasm, not the least impressive for coming at the end of a rather long day to that point. All manner of intriguing (and sometime revolting) artifacts were retrieved, from beer cans to paper cups to plastic bags to old clothes and towels to large pieces of ships’ rope to automobile tires to tampons to (most bizarre) fur-covered rat traps with wheels.

Here’s an annotated slideshow of photos from the day of our visit to Chicago Portage and Canal Origins.

After heroically hauling a heavy, ice-filled tire out of the river and up a steep slope, using one of the old ships’ ropes as a winch line, Conor and Chris suggested that the SUST program at RU should adopt the Canal Origins Shoreline as a parkland, and clean up litter there on a regular basis.

Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

The day's most bizarre find: a furry rat trap, on wheels? We're not sure.
The day’s most bizarre find: a furry rat trap, on wheels? We’re not sure.

 

College Scholarship Offered by the Friends of Volo Bog (deadline Mar 31)

I received this notice via email from the Friends of Volo Bog environmental stewardship organization. A nice scholarship opportunity for continuing SUST majors looking to supplement their finances for 2013-14.

The Friends of Volo Bog is offering an Entering College scholarship and a Continuing College scholarship for $1,000 each to outstanding students interested in pursuing an environmental career.

To be eligible for the Entering College scholarship the applicant must reside in Lake, McHenry, Kane, Cook, DuPage, Kendall, or Will County, attend a high school in one of these counties, have a minimum B average for the first three years, and plan to attend an accredited college or university.  The applicant should be planning to enter a career directly related to preserving the natural environment.

To be eligible for the Continuing College scholarship the applicant must be currently enrolled in an accredited college or university pursing a degree directly related to preserving the natural environment, have a permanent residence in Lake, McHenry, Kane, Cook, DuPage, Kendall, or Will County, have graduated from a high school from one of these counties with a minimum B average, and currently hold a minimum B average in their college studies.

Applications are due by March 31st each year for the following school year.
Application packets are available here.

The Friends of Volo Bog is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to promoting citizen awareness of the local natural heritage of Volo Bog State Natural Area, portions of which are dedicated state nature preserves, and to preserving the same through special events, educational and training programs, acquisitions of properties for such purposes and taking whatever steps deemed necessary to insure the continued care and preservation of Volo Bog State Natural Area as a natural site.

A Modest Plan to Reduce Gun Violence

After a week of deafening silence following the Newtown massacre, the National Rocket-launcher Association at last rolled out its new school safety strategy: placing an armed security guard in every American school. This is supposedly because “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” as noted by NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre.

In other words — surprise! — we need more guns.

Photo from Slickguns.com ("Best deals on guns and ammo posted by users")
Photo from Slickguns.com
(“Best deals on guns and ammo posted by users”)

The trouble is, this Wild West-inspired idea isn’t very creative or original. And it’s bound to be expensive, what with paying for the security guards’ salaries, insurance, training, equipment, medical treatment (after in-school gun battles gone awry), and the occasional funeral.

Alternatively, we might consider other slaughter-reduction strategies that don’t involve turning our schools into quasi-military installations. Something like this one, which I just thought up. I call it A Kindergartner in Every Gun Shop.

gun-shop
One of the 51,438 gun retailers in the United States, as of December 2012. By comparison, there are 36,536 grocery stores in America. (Source: ABC News)

My plan’s a little different from the NRA’s approach in that its ultimate goal is fewer guns in circulation rather than more. Better yet, as a voluntary community service program staffed by five- and six-year-olds, it’s free.

Here’s how it would work. Every kindergarten class in America would be assigned to a gun shop, ammo dealer, firing range, or firearms expo somewhere in the community. Parents and teachers would develop a schedule for the students to monitor each gun-related location — with one kid at a time working a morning, afternoon, or evening shift — during business hours. Yes, each child would miss a little school every month, but the public-service experience would be mighty educational.

Customers would be required to do a fifteen-minute “kindergartner check” before buying guns or ammunition. This would involve looking into the eyes of the child, who then asks the adult a series of standard questions, such as “Do you know how many people in Illinois die each year from gun violence?” and “Do you really need yet another assault rifle for your collection?”

Assuming the customer still desired to make a purchase, the kindergartner would then run though some basic guidelines on gun safety, including “Don’t bring your gun to school and shoot at teachers”; “Never let your surly teenage son mess with your semi-automatic rifle after playing excessively violent video games“; and “Don’t point your pistol at your face to demonstrate the safety mechanism, because it might fail and you’ll blow your head off.”

Skeptics might quibble that elementary schoolchildren aren’t truly qualified to lecture adults on gun ownership and safety, since most of them are still learning their letters and numbers. (The kids, I mean.)

A gun show at Houston's Convention Center
A gun show at Houston’s Convention Center

True, but kindergartners are really good at talking, not to mention the educational technique of “show and tell.” Some of them, particularly in crime-plagued cities like Chicago and Joliet, could offer real-life lessons in how their older relatives died in gun battles, or shot themselves accidentally, or got thrown in jail from blasting someone else. Such anecdotes can really liven up an otherwise dry lecture on firearm safety.

I see one drawback to my plan, though. Assume that the many thousands of gun dealers in our country are each open for 50-60 hours per week. Even with little Sally and Bobby pulling double shifts at their local bazooka retailer, those are a lot of business hours to cover.

I’m a little worried that at the rate that children are getting mowed down these days in our schools, we won’t have enough kindergartners to go around.

A version of this essay (“Put a Kindergartner in Every Gun Shop“) appeared as my monthly op-ed column in the Joliet Herald-News on 4 January 2012.

Congratulations to Fall 2012 SUST Graduates!

Last Friday marked the graduation of several Sustainability Studies majors at Roosevelt: Alexandra Bishay, Jessie Crow Mermel, Kenton Franklin, Keith Nawls, Jeff Wasil, and Joe Zambuto. These former undergraduates walked across the famed Auditorium Theater stage in downtown Chicago to join the growing list of alumni from Roosevelt’s SUST program, which was founded in 2010 and offers classes in downtown Chicago, suburban Schaumburg, and online.

Jessie Crow Mermel and Jeff Wasil at RU's graduation ceremony, 15 Dec 2012 (photo: M. Bryson)
Jessie Crow Mermel and Jeff Wasil at RU’s graduation ceremony, 15 Dec 2012
(photo: M. Bryson)

Each of these students pursued interesting and varied experiences during their time at RU, both within and outside of the university. Alex Bishay, Keith Nawls, and Joe Zambuto were members of the first Service & Sustainability (SUST 350) course in the spring of 2012; that class took place at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm and involved multiple field trips to urban agriculture sites in Chicago and Milwaukee, and did weekly work at this Growing Power farm site in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood.

Kenton Franklin worked as an environmental sustainability work-study student, then intern, at RU’s Schaumburg Campus, and has been an instrumental contributor to the sustainable campus redevelopment efforts focused on making the Schaumburg facility more sustainable in its landscaping, energy use, and recycling. He plans to study environmental economics in graduate school.

Jessie Crow Mermel, who worked as a part-time farm educator at Angelic Organics Farm in Caledonia, IL, while pursuing her studies at RU full-time, wrote a recent guest essay for the SUST @ RU blog, co-developed a media presentation (with current SUST major Mary Beth Radeck) on suburban sustainability issues for the 2011 Sustainability and Ethics Forum at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and intends to pursue graduate study in ecopsychology.

Jeff Wasil was already working in the environmental field when we transferred to Roosevelt in 2009, and then soon thereafter declared himself as one of the very first SUST majors at RU in the Fall of 2010. That semester he took SUST 220 Water, and managed to find time to fly to Lake Constance in Switzerland to give a talk at one of the most prestigious water conferences in Europe. Jeff later won acceptance to the University of IL at Chicago’s summer Sustainability Institute in 2011, where he worked on Chicago water conservation issues and planning with fellow undergraduate and graduate students from throughout the region. Jeff is employed as an Engineering Technical Expert in the Evinrude Corporation’s emissions testing, certification, and regulatory program, trying to lower the carbon emissions of boat engines as much as is technically feasible.

Congratulations to all our SUST grads this December, and best of luck to our continuing majors as they enjoy a well-earned rest and gear up for the Spring 2013 semester!

Visualizing Earth’s Water

Here is an image posted by one of my students to the last discussion forum of this semester in my Sustainability Studies 220 Water course, along with her comment about it.

It can sometimes be challenging to wrap our minds around water scarcity on Earth when we so often picture it as a blue planet with immensely deep seas. Graphs certainly help to put the idea of water scarcity in perspective, but nothing has driven home this idea as much for me as this image from the USGS. The large blue bubble represents the volume of all the water (salt and fresh) on Earth (its diameter being 860 miles) in comparison to the volume of Earth. The small bubble represents the freshwater on Earth (including the water that is within trees, plants, you and I). And the teeny tiny blue dot by Georgia (look closely) represents all the freshwater that is accessible for our use. It looks smaller than the Great Lakes, but you must imagine it in three dimensions.

We live in a very visual culture. What water-related environmental images have you come across that have had a strong impact on you? What campaigns can you think of that have been successful in using images to impact change? How do you see art, photography, film, etc, having a role in expanding awareness on these critical issues we face? ~Jessie

One of the great things about the USGS page this comes from is that this arresting visual representation of the volume of Earth’s water (and fresh water, and available fresh water) compared to the total volume of Earth as a whole is then accompanied by statistical data and explanations that help us understand the physical story being told in that image. This in turn highlights, and then complicates, the often-evoked dichotomy of image (emotion) and text (reason) — the assumption in popular culture that pictures speak to our hearts and guts, while words appeal to our minds.

Of course, we know that dichotomy to be simplistic, if not simply false. Images such as this do more than pull at our heartstrings — consider the lonely and threatened polar bear here, or seals with fur matted with oil; they get us to think; they cause us to ask questions — in this case, about scale, about the relationship of water to the rest of the Earth’s mass, about the thinness and fragility of the biosphere (which is defined by water, without which there would be no “bio”).

Conversely, textual discourse — whether a poem or a scientific technical report — can stoke our emotions and even spur us to action, especially if we’re open to receiving its message and understand its internal logic. The impacts and effects of both text and image are wonderfully complex, and in the best cases work together more powerfully than they can separately. This example of Earth’s water is a fine case of that, writ large.

The work of science is phenomenally important to the advancement of sustainability in human communities — both in terms of economics and social equity — as well as to the conservation of natural ecosystems, basic resources (air, water, soil), and species. But science alone cannot change the policy that governs our human actions and regulates our excessive tendencies to waste, to think only of the short term, to ignore the unintended consequences of our technologies.

For those huge and ever-present challenges, we also need ideas — and those are debated and created in the creative fires of the arts and humanities in ways that cannot be replicated in scientific and political discourse. For sustainability to be a guiding force of human culture as well as a central feature of our governments (regardless of political persuasion), it needs art, music, literature, and other creative endeavors that define us as a species. And it needs people to connect such expressions to the worlds of science and policy as much as possible, as a means of building bridges and reshaping our views of the world — and our role in it.

Spring Registration at RU is Underway

Advising and registration are now ongoing (since Nov 1st) for the spring semester at RU. If you’re one of my advisees, please check out the Advising Resources here on this blog (accessible from the top menu). Look over the spring schedule, check your remaining course requirements, and shoot me an email with your planned schedule and any questions you have about your upcoming classes.

Otherwise, be sure to contact your assigned advisor to talk with them about your course selections for spring (and summer, while you’re at it). November is the best time to get signed up!