Zhou Yi, a finance major at Tongji University, is staring at the computer screen and clicking the mouse button, choosing the best elective courses.

College students are being more practical in choosing their elective courses in the new school term. Whether these courses would benefit them in their future work is considered a priority.

His choices: Japanese, stocks and investment, financial engineering, and the global economy. There are 150 possibilities.

Zhou's criterion? Usefulness.

I'll only choose courses that will benefit my internship and future work, he says, explaining that he wants to work as a stockbroker.

Among Zhou's 50 classmates, 35 are taking courses like French and computer applications, with a few delving into ethics and philosophy. Their choices are all related to career ambition, they say.

At Tongji, students are required to take electives and are given a number of choices ranging from geology to Chinese culture and oil painting. By graduation, they are supposed to have finished three electives in the liberal arts, three in sciences and two in the arts. Many students say that they only attend useful classes and skip others.

This phenomenon may be spreading.

Last semester, over 500 students at Northern Jiaotong University in Beijing applied for courses that would help with their future work, like law and journalism.

Courses like history and folk art were less popular and only attracted half of the expected number of applicants.

The electives that fail to attract a quorum are dropped the following semester. Enrollments in popular courses have increased, said Zhang Lusheng, a junior. As a result, the popular courses get even more popular and those that get little attention eventually disappear.

A number of students complain about this. Even though many students are practical in their choice, others see the electives as a way of exploring new fields of knowledge, says Jiang Min, a junior at Suzhou University.

His experience working as a part-time salesman told him that just excelling in your area of specialization is far from enough, so he plans to take electives in a broad range of subjects this year.

Then there are those who protest against the cancellations because they enjoy lectures by certain professors. Though some subjects sound useless, the professor makes them come alive and teaches you a lot, said Zhang Lusheng, from Northern Jiaotong.

That kind of knowledge seems useless in the short term, but it eventually benefits you.

Tong Xufeng, head of the Dean s Office at Tongji, says: Students should not be too practical. Electives will acquaint you with other fields and broaden your horizons, which can benefit you a lot in the long run.

In the United States and Britain, students have more electives to choose from and are expected to complete a certain number to graduate. Undergraduates can also take electives at other universities for credit.

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