With the spring term coming to a close, students prepared to register for classes for the Fall 2014 term the past week. To say the least, it was not an easy stride. While it would be simple to go into a detailed comparison between registration week and the Hunger Games, we’ll keep it short and say that everyone, including next year’s seniors, felt like District 13.

Although the school seems to be aware that there is a constant theme of insufficiency of seats for classes every term, there seems to be no action on their behalf to fix this issue. As a result, some students were shafted in terms of the classes they were going to take, having to resort to picking from the bottom of the bunch to find anything that would fit their schedule in any way.

Additionally, students had to face issues with registering through WebAdvisor, as the renaming of courses in some departments made it difficult for them to add classes that had said courses listed a prerequisite to their schedule. For some time, the registrar’s office felt like they were giving away the newest iPhone before it had even been announced.

Another problematic set of courses was that under the Senior Capstone core requirement. Although juniors would be completing enough credits by the end of the term to earn senior status, they still faced issues registering for any of the ethics courses offered in the fall, as they technically were not seniors yet. This resulted in yet another congregation at the registrar’s office similar to the Saint Patrick’s Day block party of 2011, with people hoping to get a spot in the courses they need to fulfill their requirements for graduation.

Although the wonderful ladies at the registrar’s office were able to sign people in, the story did not have a happy ending. With the overload of people looking to take an ethics capstone course and the lack of sections offered for them, the only apparent solution was to reduce the amount of people that could register for the class.

This only stirred the pot further, as it meant that students would have to be dropped from the course and then left to attempt and scavenge the remains of the open courses category on WebAdvisor, hoping to find a course that both fit their schedule and was not overflowing with students already. My name is Juan Mendez and I am one of those students.

Why did the administration decide to kick people out of the ethics courses instead of looking to open more sections after talking to the professors in order to accommodate for everyone’s necessities?

While it is understandable that there are a plethora of courses students can take, it seems that the factor of academic work load was left out of the equation. It’s thrilling to be taking a 15-credit plus course load where every course is extremely demanding, to say the least. That is, if “thrilling” is interchangeable with “miserable” in this context.

With the chaos that was course registration for the J-term, you would think we were going to catch a break this time around and that the administration would learn its lesson.It should be in the school’s priorities to accommodate for everyone’s academic necessities, especially those of people who only have a small number of classes left to take. It seems as if sleep is not the currency we’re trading anymore, as it is extinct thanks to the fact that the bigger picture was left out.

To those affected and looking for new courses to fit into their schedules without messing up their sleep cycles, their work schedule or their mental sanity, happy Hunger Games and may the odds be ever in your favor.