Basket weaving, Vikings, and Birds…

So you’re staring out your window day dreaming, while you’re supposed to be writing  a fifteen page essay about the history of conscription in Canada and you see a cardinal…true story (see photo below) and you think to yourself, “I wonder if there’s a course at U of T about birds of Canada.” Perhaps you have some free time in your schedule next term and you’d like to hone your knowledge of basket weaving or Vikings, but the prospect of searching through the phone book sized course calendar is intimidating you. Well now there’s an easier way to find your courses. Drumroll….it’s the new Course Finder Tool on the Art and Science web site. So maybe I’m a little bit too excited about this gadget. Give me a break it’s been a really slow month. Apart from my obvious need for senseless distraction from my schoolwork, this tool is pretty awesome. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent leafing through the course calendar in search of a course that a friend’s friend’s roomate’s TA’s little brother’s friend told me about that sounded so very interesting. Invariably, I always only remember one word from the name of course. I’m so bad with names, I admittedly don’t know the proper name of half the courses I’m enrolled in…I make my own names up for them. But I digress, the art of course selection is a skill that must be developed and the new course finder tool is just the thing I need. I shall demonstrate…watch. See how easy that was? I just typed birds into the search field and the engine returned all the courses that U of T offers in ornithology...talk about a bird course! From here you can scroll through the courses at leisure and click on any ones you might be interested in to get more course info. One caution: I had trouble running the course finder in Google chrome, bit it works fine for me in Explorer. I hope you'll have as much fun with this little gem as I did! -Lori