INDICATIONS THAT YOUR NEW CLASS MIGHT BE MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

We've all had classes like it: you go into it expecting it to be of
middling difficulty, only to find out very quickly that this is going to be one of those terms that teaches you *exactly* how long you can go without doing laundry. One of those terms where you adopt a hunter-gatherer semi-nomadic lifestyle, and subsist solely from food scavenged from academic seminars. One of those terms where you spend more time in lab than you do in your room. Looking back, there were numerous signs in the first week that indicate the path a class would take.

Things that are Bad Signs and indicate that your class is going to suck:

1.  The syllabus has written on it "Class Motto: That which does not kill us only makes us stronger" (this was the first warning sign);

2.  What is normally a full class under other professors has only seven people in it under this one, and one of them ends up dropping the class after falling ill, missing two days of lecture and lab, and discovering that she's too far behind to ever catch up;

3.  When you tell friends who's teaching your class, they get the same look on their face that they might get if you told them that your dog just died;

4.  While discussing what his tests are like, the professor mentions casually that he considers it perfectly acceptable to test you on things that aren't covered by the textbook, in lecture, or in lab ("I give you guys tools to solve certain types of problems, and you should be able to extrapolate from there. Assimilate, Correlate, and Synthesize- that's the second class motto.");

5.  The class average on the first test is a 60%, and the prof is impressed;

6.  You find yourself taking more pages of notes in the first week than you usually do in a month of most other classes;