At this time, many Berkeley students are selecting their tentative courses for the Fall 2015 semester. I’m doing the same as well. I’m thinking of taking EE 227BT, Convex Optimization, which is a math class describing the wonders and treasures of convexity, and maybe CS 287, Advanced Robotics, which pertains to the math behind robot motion and decision making. In a few weeks, I’ll need to let Berkeley’s Disabled Students Program (DSP) know about my courses so that they can make arrangements to secure semester-long services.

I have to make such course decisions early and I have to be sure about what I am taking. The reason is that it is difficult for me to add or drop a class once a semester starts.

Most students do not have this problem. Schools usually have an add/drop period during the beginning of the semester. In that time, students can show up to a variety of classes and decide to drop a few that turned out not to be what they expected. (The overwhelming reason why students drop a class is because it demands more work than they can handle.) Depending on the class policies, students can also enroll in new classes within this period even if they didn’t show up to the first few lectures.

For me, I don’t have that luxury because class accommodations require weeks of advance preparation. To start, I must inform Berkeley’s Disabled Student Program about the classes I am taking so that they can make the necessary preparations. Securing a semester-long CART provider or sign language interpreter is not automatic because availability varies; I have experienced cases where I got accommodations with a day’s notice, and others where I couldn’t get any despite a week’s notice or more.

Those were for one-time events, though. It takes a longer time to secure CART providers or interpreters for semester-long jobs, and if I were to show up to a class for a few weeks and decide to drop it when there were still eight weeks to go, then those people would effectively lose up to eight weeks’ worth of money. (Replacing the funding with other interpreting jobs is not always easy, because demand occurs at varying times and locations.) In fact, when I was in my second semester at Williams, I enrolled in a class’s lab section that met on Thursday afternoons. I quickly secured accommodations for that lab session … and then just before the semester began, I decided to switch to having that session meet on Wednesday afternoons, because it greatly simplified my schedule.

It was a routine switch, but doing so cost that Thursday interpreter about $600 dollars’ worth of payment in a month. While I did secure a different interpreter for that lab session, the original one did not work for me again in my remaining time at Williams, and I constantly regret my choice to switch sessions. He obviously had the opportunity to work for me in later semesters, but because I dropped that lab session on short notice, he (understandably) did not want to take the risk of losing more money. Furthermore, Williams is isolated and does not have an interpreting workforce, so the interpreters I did have (from Albany, New York) had to drive long distances to get to work. Thus, a one-hour commitment at the school could have easily taken up four hours in a day, which reduces the chances of finding other interpreting work in the same day. This is one reason why I often tried to schedule consecutive classes to maximizes the monetary benefit for my interpreters.

As a result of that experience, I did not drop any Williams classes other than that lab session, which barely counts since it was part of the same general course. It does mean I have to “tough it out” in classes that turn out to be really difficult or boring, but I was a good student so this usually was not an issue. This line of thinking is carrying over to Berkeley, where I aim to complete all classes I enroll in and to minimize sudden schedule chances. I really want to maintain a good relationship between Berkeley’s DSP and the San Francisco agency that provides interpreting services.

Nevertheless, it’s important to retain perspective and realize the best case, most probable case, and worst case scenarios. Having hassles relating to adding and dropping classes is better than not getting any accommodations.