Students love a chance to slack off when class is cancelled, but one would hope that no one will view next Wednesday in that way.

March 30 will be the second annual College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research & Creative Activity Symposium (URCA), featuring presentations and posters that showcase numerous students’ hard work.

Uninformed students may be quick to write off URCA as a boring day of students taking the professor’s place at the podium, but URCA aims to be anything but boring.

The CAS houses the most diverse collection of majors out of the four colleges; ranging from English to ecology, music to math and theater to toxicology. The topics covered at URCA literally do include something to pique everyone’s interest.

Students who opt to sleep the day away instead of checking out the symposium will be missing out. URCA offers the opportunity to learn more about your own major or enhance your knowledge of other fields.

Freshmen, transfers and anyone else who is undecided about what to major in would be doing themselves a favor if they treat URCA like an undergraduate buffet. Like what you see your fellow students doing? Well, you could be doing that, too, and it’ll cost you nothing to watch a few presentations and see if anything suits you.

If your plate is truly full already (which is especially likely if you’re working on your own thesis or major project), URCA may seem like the last thing on your mind, but it may not be as impossible to squeeze it into your schedule as you think.

The day is divided into seven hour-long oral sessions, so you’re under no obligation to give up your entire day if you can’t or just don’t want to. This is especially advantageous for students from the other three colleges; although classes are, regrettably, not cancelled campus-wide, students from business, education and nursing are welcome to attend any presentation.

If nothing else, use URCA as a chance to make your own life easier: odds are you’ll be required to work on your own significant project before you graduate, so you might as well go see how students who came before you conquered the challenge.

For more information about the symposium, please see the advance article by Collegian Reporter Tyler Remmel on Page 1 of this week’s paper, or visit http://www.ashland.edu/documents/pdf/2011-urca-symposium-schedule for a PDF schedule of presentations.