islanded in a stream of stars

I hate to be the one to point this out, but...you have EIGHT SEMESESTERS to take all of the amazing classes available to you. Why don't you take a somewhat reasonable courseload your first semester and kill yourself after that if you so choose. Also, if you transfer your credit from harvard, you could use this as mental justification that you're not in anyway behind, you just already took one of the courses you need last summer. You're starting ahead of the game, give yourself some breathing room.

And yeah, we're pretty awesome at justifying completely unreasonable things to ourselves (waffles and yogurt for breakfast...)