I did not reflect upon behaviorism until I was asked to read Karen Pryor’s book Don’t Shoot the Dog for my internship working with dolphins this summer. It did get me back on track with a theory that I had not looked at for a while, considering behaviorism is not all that popular in the human psychology department at Cornell (which is fine, I guess). But lately, I’ve been coming back to the typical thing you hear everywhere when you start studying this school of thought: Our society, as a whole, is a wonderful web of stimuli and rewards.

7:00 a.m. is too early. Course Enroll, what pre-enrollment is commonly referred to at Cornell University, should not be so early in the morning. A better time would be more like 9:00 a.m. 9:00 a.m. is early but it isn’t too early. You can wake up at 9:00 a.m. and enroll in courses and continue with your day, seamlessly. For example, if you have a class at 10:10 for which you typically wake up at 9:25, it’s not too much of an inconvenience to wake up a half-hour earlier, at 8:55, to enroll is classes. 8:55, by the way, to allow for five minutes of preparation. This involves turning on your laptop, connecting to the internet and dealing with that general early-morning fogginess.