It’s just about May, which means that I’m coming into the homestretch of my junior year here at the University of Massachusetts. This essentially means I spend most of my time running around like some kind of barnyard animal missing an appendage. Right about now is when every professor decides to assign a huge paper, and the ones who don’t assign papers give exams.

All right, not every professor. You nice professors out there who don’t do that, your students love you. Don’t ever change. Let me know what class you teach so I can register for it next semester. This week I have an exam, three papers due, and three books to read! Who has time to read three whole books in one week?

At any rate, at this time of year when the workload gets tough and the weather is gorgeous, I know I start to wonder why I should bother going to my classes. I mean, who needs to learn when it’s warm and sunny out? I’ve learned for seven months already. I need Frisbee.

This mentality is bad. Your alternate plan will always seem like a good idea at the time when compared to classes, but in the long run it will screw you over. This is a guaranteed fact of life – I know because I learned the hard way. Thus, I’ve come up with a couple of suggestions to beat off that nagging little voice that says, “Oh come on, it’s just one class; what’s gonna happen?”

Watch a reality TV show. Watching people eat cow vomit with a side of spicy hot slugs to win money will remind you that if you don’t go to your classes and end up flunking out, eating cow vomit may be your only potential source of income. I mean, it’s cow vomit or working at McDonald’s. Hard to pick the lesser of two evils, huh?

Go visit your grandmother. She will tell you about how privileged you are to be going to college. You know, when she was your age she had to walk 15 miles in the snow to work in the factory for 12 cents an hour. Barefoot! Through woods inhabited by packs of hungry wolves! These kids today don’t know how spoiled they are with their fancy paved streets and their central heat and air! Geez!

I realize, however, that no matter how much encouragement to go to class is offered, some people are just not going to go because they’re just those kind of people. If you’re one of those people, here are a couple of things you can do instead of going to class that you can still manage to learn something from.

Go out to lunch. No, not take out, go sit down and have lunch. First you’ll work on your decision-making skills. With all those choices on the menu, it will be a tough one, but I have faith in you. When you get the bill you’ll have to figure out a tip for your waitperson. Brushing up on those math skills and chowing down on some non-DC goodness is always a good idea. Mmm … education.

Go to a museum. The Springfield Science Museum has an exhibit on dinosaurs. They move around and everything. Watching dinosaur robot things move around is inherently more exciting than watching professors move around. You’ll learn about history, how to following driving directions and how to budget your gift shop spending money and still have some left to get gas on the way home.

But then there are those people who don’t skip class because it’s nice out. They don’t want to go out and have a good time; they just want to sit around their rooms all day. Indeed, we all know those people. Well, bring your buddy a copy of The Collegian, because he, too, can do some learning, right in his own room.

That box under your bed with the 2 week-old pizza in it? Break that out. It’s guaranteed to be growing some mold. You’ll be able to learn all kinds of things about bacteria and spores, maybe some entomology. If you take a bite, you can even learn about ambulances, stomach pumping, and antibiotics!

Education is not found only in the classroom. It is all around us, sometimes where we least expect it. Although I understand that some of those alternative education techniques sound awfully tempting, go to your classes. You’re going to have papers and exams whether you go or not, so you might as well know what you’re supposed to write about or what you’re going to be tested on. Who knows, maybe what you learn in your classes will actually prove to be of some use to you in the future. How crazy would that be?

Stacy Kasdin is a Collegian columnist.