For this summer semester I mixed up dates and missed early registration - the best time to ensure you get the classes you want. So I scrambled about, harassing instructors of classes I want and generally panicking about getting any classes that would be useful.
This morning was the opening of late registration. I was ready to go at 6:30, checking to make sure my list of CRNs was right and everything was ready. Mostly I was making sure that I was in the system and actively ensuring I didn't get timed out. I got into the add/drop page for this summer the moment it opened, pasted my CRNs and got into everything I was shooting for (one of which may get dropped if I get permission to enter a class I really want).
Just curious, I tried the login page at 7:04. The queue was at 654, up to 973 in the little less than a minute I watched. They set up the queue system because apparently the opening of early registration saw the system crash about twenty minutes after it opened. Interesting trivia - a little more than 80% of classes had been filled by the time it crashed.
I got the impression that the school is trying desperately to add summer classes, after communicating with several instructors. Five of the nine instructors I emailed shot back a form mentioning that they have received a lot of emails requesting entrance, two never responded and the other two responded only because they appreciated the concise and eloquent/formal wording of my emails. I was also talking to a couple of my instructors and have heard much the same thing - they are getting pounded with email requests for entrance.
I am really glad that I have the opportunity to manage all the issues of going to school with the technology available to streamline it all. When my dad (76) talks about what he had to do to register for classes in the very early fifties, I just cringe. I definitely don't feel all that compelled to whine about the trouble of fucking around online, lying in my bed, waiting for the moment I can swoop in and get my classes...
2 comments:
Nice work! Congrats on getting into everything you wanted.
The British system is very, very different - there's much less choice (the furthest I ever got from what you would call my "major" of genetics was one physiology course). Only people from my department (biochem, genetics, mol biol, microbiol, physiology) could take classes taught by my department, and everyone in the department took exactly the same courses in the first year; there was some choice after that, but not much. It made things a hell of a lot easier!
I suppose remembering to be ready online at a specific hour beats having to wait in long lines and running around to get signatures and often finding that a course was closed only after doing a lot of legwork to try and register for it. Still, I feel really bad for anyone who suddenly develops computer problems at the worst possible moment!
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