It’s halfway into the quarter and you’ve only just learned the name of the dude who sits next to you who won’t shut up.

He’s Paul. He’s the guy who shares Buzzfeed articles on Facebook. He’s the guy who hasn’t stopped playing Farmville.

He’s the guy who saves funny pictures of his friends, makes memes out of them, then shows them to you every Tuesday.

“Classic Kevin, man. Classic.”

He tries to invite you to a party every weekend that you don’t want to go to. Every weekend you have a new excuse.

“Grandma died.”

“Mom’s got cancer.”

“Mom just died.”

He’ll believe anything you tell him. Paul’s a nice, sweet kid. He just wants to make some friends. But is that your problem? Farmville sucks. Paul’s memes suck. Frankly, Paul sucks too.

But there’s only one more month left in the quarter.  You only have to deal with Paul for one more month.

If this was the semester system you’d barely be scraping past the introduction to the course, but at De Anza, baby, at De Anza you’re already done with midterms.

That’s the beauty of the quarter system. You feel like you’re blazing through classes, finishing them faster than all your friends stuck at semester schools, when really you’re all going to finish around roughly the same time.

They’re stuck in the math class with the monotonous professor for another month and a half, and you – you’re about to get a whole new schedule with a new set of classes.

If you end up disliking a class after two weeks, no problem, there’s barely 10 left. There’s a multitude of classes offered, and the quarter system allows students to branch out of their comfort zone and try classes that they wouldn’t dare in a semester school.

After all, isn’t the point of a community college to figure out what discipline you want to devote your future to?

Maybe you started off as a mathematician and decided you want to follow in Jesus’s footsteps and become a carpenter. At a semester school you wouldn’t have bothered taking a furniture design class – that’s way too big of a commitment.

However in the quarter system you’ve got more flexibility. If you don’t like it, no problem, it won’t take up much time anyway.

Plus, Paul won’t be in the furniture design class. He’s a philosophy major, but he’s thinking about switching to psychology because he loves helping his friends with their problems.

F***in’ Paul.