Registration time is chaotic enough, but it seems nearly every Mercyhurst student had to jump through hoops to register for spring and J-term.
First of all, the times listed for each student are not entirely correct.
A student cannot register until two minutes after the listed time. Some students were given registration times while they were in class, or very soon after.
We are anxious enough about registering as soon as possible to ensure we get into the classes we want. No student wants to rush back to their room after class just to register right at their time. At least this year there appeared to be a sufficient number of J-term classes, whereas last year there were not.
After becoming very familiar with the dreaded “error” screen, several students, including myself, had to continuously jump back and forth between computers in order to complete registration.
Freshman year is supposed to be the most difficult in terms of scheduling. For starters, many freshmen did not know exactly how to register.
Some students’ advisers did not clear them to register right away. This seems to happen most often with freshmen.
Luckily, most advisers sent emails to their freshmen advisees to schedule meetings. Also, the freshmen Resident Assistants have been very helpful.
In Warde Hall, the RAs had nights where they showed their residents how to register through WebAdvisor.
Another problem that affected students was that certain classes were only available for students with certain majors.
A myriad of students and advisors were not aware of this until they were actually registering.
Those who are a part of the Learning Differences program were able to register first and athletes and honors students registered with the seniors.
However, some athletes were not scheduled to register at the appropriate time, which added additional stress.
Honors students also had some issues. Honors Preparation Year students were told they could only have early registration if they were registering for an honors class.
This was not entirely true, but these students did have to ask for early registration, so several students were not able to take advantage of this.
Most of these problems might be solved if registration was done on paper instead of through technology.
Regardless, this crazy time has now come to a close, and hopefully administration will make it easier to schedule for terms to come.