Hi Angoose,
There are a couple of ways to organize your time table...I personally prefer mine.
What I do:
I make a grid/table that has times from 8am-10pm broken up until 30 min increments on the x-axis, and monday to friday on the y-axis; one for each semester.
Look at the course availability master list, and see what courses are available for next year. On the list they are identified as being available for term 1 (sept-dec), term 2 (jan-april) or term 3 (sept-april). E at the end of a course means it is in the evenings.
Courses are organized in the same format: xA0y: x= the year the course is for (1 = first year, 3= 3rd year etc) and y = the number of units (3 = half year course [4 months; either sept-dec or jan-april], 6=full year course, 0= lab safety course and there are also some 2, 4 and 5 unit classes in some programs...but I have no idea what those units mean in terms of term lenth and whatnot. So if you have Bio 1A03 you know it is a 3 unit first year Bio class.
Look at all of the courses I
need to take, and find out when they are available. Courses are separated into Core (the lecture, indicated by C01 or C22 etc; basically a number of some kind), Tutorial (T01, T55), and for some classes Labs (L01, L22).
Cores are the lectures you have with the prof, and are offered 1-3 times a week in 50 min increments. Sometimes there are more than one section of the class. Tutorials are primarily for Soc Sci and Humanities classes and are much smaller, generally less than 25 students and taught by a Teaching Assistant (TA). Labs are...for courses you do experiments and around the same size as tutorials and also taught by a TA. Since tutorials and labs are much smaller than lectures, there are multiple sections for each in a given class.
From there, I plug each of the different sections into the spots on my grid. I use a bunch of different markers/highlighters etc to make sure I can tell the differences between the classes. I also make sure to indicate the labs and tutorials.
Then I do the same with all of my elective courses.
Based on your grid, you can see when the classes you need to take are available, and when the electives you want are available. If there are two classes occurring at the same time, it is known as a conflict. If it is between an elective class and and a required class, you would obviously make sure to select the required one.
Now, McMaster has changed the actual selection process around every year for the past four years. So when you actually get to the course selection software (SOLAR), I'm not sure if you you will be able to pick the specific sections of your cores, labs and tutorials right away, or if that comes later on after the initial course selection.
It's very, very unlikely as a first year you will have days off, especially if you are in the Sciences or Eng. Out of the 12 semesters I took at Mac, I had three with one day off/week and one with two days off per week. Hypothetically, it's possible...but not very possible since first year classes are usually three classes/week of fifty minutes, rather than two or three hours in a row like upper year classes.