While graduation is eminent for many seniors, the UW’s younger students are actively involved in the process of choosing their own majors and minors.

For many, this experience is heady; unless you entered the UW hell-bent on a specific career, the majority of students need time to consider their options. Many find it useful to enroll in a variety of classes, exploring as many avenues as are productively possible.

In this way, one can evaluate whether their life-long dream of achieving a bachelor’s degree in applied and computational mathematical sciences is possible and, in fact, desirable.

Many will counsel that to pick a major, you should find something of interest to you.

A common suggestion is to go through the comprehensive degree list on the UW Student Guide and individually analyze and study anything of even the slightest interest.

Talking to friends and family will also present options, ideas and personal accounts that the student guide fails to represent.

However, you will likely reach a time when the major itself is a moot and immaterial point: To be done and out, you need to pick something to validate the last 14 years of study. Rather than selecting a random and easily accessible major — or stressing until you’re reduced to a Gollum-like entity — look at the most basic and necessary aspects of existence.

Choose your major based on the quality of the bathrooms in the buildings in which the majority of your studies will be concentrated.

I realize that this is a crude and unsophisticated approach to educational goal-setting; for that reason, I shall refer to the restroom as a water closet, or W.C. for short, to lend elegance to a gross topic. I am of a Victorian mindset regarding these aspects of being a living organism.

The most educationally productive method is narrowing an already-determined list by visiting the buildings in which you would be studying, assessing the W.C.s and finalizing a decision based on which degree would put you in the closest proximity to the best washrooms.

More adventurous is to launch a quest for the best W.C.s on campus and then discover which majors concentrate their studies in these buildings.

For instance, Loew Hall’s first-floor men’s room is large, well laid out, moderately clean and offers its patrons reading material through the history of commentary and debates penned within its stalls.

Similarly, the men’s room in the basement of the Art Building is scrawled with witty cartoons and thought-provoking statements and questions. However, it has one sink, one urinal and one stall crammed into one corner of an otherwise excessive room. I’ve thought of hosting dance parties in its wasted space.

The toilets on the first floor of the Communications Building are inclined to spray once flushed, though the W.C. is otherwise decent — despite a certain tightness of space.

The best W.C.s are in Mary Gates Hall: spacious, clean and elegant with the perfect combination of open and usable spaces.

Avoid the W.C.s in the IMA, and especially those in the locker rooms. Padelford has strangely cramped rooms with odd angles. Miller’s third-floor men’s room is epically huge and beautiful, but wasteful of its openness. I witnessed a man sponge-bathing the one time I entered a W.C. in Parrington. All of the men’s rooms in Balmer are laid out like mazes, with corridors leading to urinals, and sinks and stalls all within the same W.C. Thomson’s W.C.s are unique in that some of the stalls have their own sinks, mirrors and paper-towel dispensers, and though they resemble those of the attached Communications Building, the urinals are so close together that no more than one person may use them at a time. The doorways into these W.C.s are also strangely tight and make maneuvering a challenge.

Use these as a starting point for your own W.C. evaluation — your life as a student and living organism will be much better if your participation with campus facilities is limited to only the best possible experience. What you actually end up studying isn’t nearly as important as this most basic of comforts.

Reach columnist Matt Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.