Occidental College
Campus Conversations
Registration Frustration
Hey everyone! Thanksgiving is almost a week away! (Can't wait to go home!) Around this time every year, students must register for their spring semester classes. The days leading up to registration can be very stressful. What if you don't get the class you want? What if you don't get any classes? What if you can't get into the class that you need to graduate and then you never graduate and can't get a job and are homeless and poor forever? (These are just some of my personal thoughts). Registration at Oxy begins with meeting with your advisor. Your advisor is a professor assigned to you freshman year that works in the department you plan on majoring in. He or she can help you choose the classes you want to enroll in. Your advisor also tells you what your registration time is. In previous years, each grade would have a registration day, and within that grade there would be two groups: morning and afternoon registration. If you get afternoon registration one semester, you get morning registration the next semester. In all the years of registration leading up to this, sophomores would have the first registration day for the spring semester. This year, the administration changed the process, though. They realized that the grades that got to register first filled up all of the most popular classes, leaving the other half of the school struggling to get into any of their favorites. This year, everyone had two registration times; the first to sign up for half of their classes, and after everyone had gone through this first stage, the process would start again and people would be able to sign up for the rest of their classes at the second registration time. "What a great idea!" people may think. And for most, this was a positive experience. But this year I'm a sophomore and I had afternoon registration last year, which means that this year I was supposed to be one of the first hundred people to register. Any other year, this would mean that I could enroll in any class I wanted. But I had to share early registration with the rest of the school. I realize that this may seem like a bit of selfish bitterness! And I'm not going to deny it. I am a little bitter. There are some classes I wish I could be in next semester that were filled up by the time my second registration time rolled around. Overall, though, I grudgingly think that this change is for the best. Everyone gets a chance to have at least two classes that they really wanted. The school may just have to wait a few more years for the students who knew about sophomore registration domination to graduate, so that the students don't know what they're missing out on.