Once you start working, unless you telecommute or have flexible hours AND choose to start at 10, odds are that you’ll start at 9 or earlier, with up to 1 hour commute not to mention the time to devote to grooming, getting your kids up/ready [huge time sink], taking them to school, etc. Even on days when you don’t work, your kids will wake you up, because they can’t get up on Wednesdays but on Saturdays they’re up. Not to mention emergencies like nightmares, throwing up in the night, etc. Then you have all their activities and/or all the things you must do as part of belonging to a community, many of which will require waking up relatively early.
It’ll be a bit quieter when you’re in your 50s but then your body will make things harder on you… so, basically, if you can, enjoy the 10 am class.
(In college, you can roll out of bed and go to class with messed up hair, a random tee shirt, pajama bottoms, and flip flops. Another of those privileges you have exactly 4 years to enjoy.)
You can’t really “talk to them after class” the way you do in high school. The “talk to them after class” that HS teachers do is switched to office hours in college. There’s no real chit chat at the beginning or end of class in college. The professor is coming from somewhere else, gets their stuff out, their assistant (if it’s a large class) sets up the material/slides/chalk/clicker test/whatever, class takes place on material you had to read BEFORE class, then class ends, the professor leaves, the assistant turns things off, students leave because they have to hightail it to make it to their next class in 10mn.
Most professors will have 2 hours of office hours every week. The trick is that you should go before you “need to”. “need to” is usually “right before the midterm” or, even worse “right after you got a bad grade on the midterm”. You can go during your first week, when things are quiet enough, then return as needed, once the ice has been broken. Keep in mind that during the first 3 weeks or so, there’s hardly anyone going to office hours, then suddenly it picks up and right around week 6-8 panic sets in and there’s a swell of people. So, you want to go during your first week, right before your first exam, and roughly 2 weeks before the midterm, as this will certainly be the best times for you. In the second half of the semester, you should have the hang of it and be able to pick the best times to go. Enter them in your calendar when you reverse flow chart all exams and papers due. Imagine there’s office hours October 7, 9, 14 and 16, with a paper due October 17. Basically everyone will crowd out the professor on October 16. You should be going on the 9th and/or the 14th, with an outline and a couple ideas to see if you’re going in the right direction (that way, the professor will let you know if you’re not, and what you should read to make your paper even better… and you’ll have enough time to actually DO it!)
