Scheduling not perfect

Lauren Abbott, opinion editor

As we come back from Easter break, it is time to jump into everyone’s favorite thing: scheduling.

If you are anything like me, you started looking at the courses as soon as they were posted on Student Planning and have your own highlighted newspaper catalog.

Since switching over to the Student Planning system, I have found that scheduling has become easier for students.

I really enjoy being able to add courses to my semester and see it laid out in a way that lets me easily see if any of my classes would overlap.

I also like how it lets you tentatively schedule out your other semesters.

This is especially helpful for students who are double majors or who have minors to get a sense of what future semesters may look like and also plan for any necessary courses that are only offered once every few years.

This system takes away the headache of having to sit and write out four or five different potential schedules on paper or spreadsheets just to get a sense of what classes might work together.

That being said, there are still some issues with the system.

I know that some of the classes for next semester were posted on Student Planning before the paper catalogs came out.

This caused a bunch of students to try and plan their schedules from that information, even knowing that a majority of classes had not been finalized yet.

My biggest problem with the scheduling process this semester is that now that the paper catalogs are available, they still don’t match Student Planning.

The system not matching up is a big problem for students who want to schedule a class that apparently does not exist within the system.

Along with my major, I also have three minors, so I have a lot of requirements to meet before I graduate in two years.

To meet all my requirements I have to take 18 credits every semester until graduation.

This doesn’t leave me a lot of wiggle room when it comes to scheduling.

I know I am not the only student who is packing a lot into our four years here at Mercyhurst, and being able to plan that out is vital to students getting to graduation.

Once I got a catalog, I looked through it and was able to create an ideal schedule for next semester that keeps me on track for graduating.

But when I went to put it into my Student Planning schedule, some of the courses that were listed on the catalog did not exist.

This is extremely frustrating, because I am a planner and I like to have things laid out well in advance.

Not being able to put my schedule into the system is incredibly frustrating, especially with Advising Day coming up next week.

I want to be able to have my schedule finalized and uploaded before I go to my advising meeting.

While I do like Student Planning as a whole and highly prefer it to the old way we used to do it, there are still some kinks that need to be worked out.