By Rachel Lutz, Columnist
We were all freshman once. We remember being last pick for scheduling. But this has gotten a bit out of hand. I was signed onto the portal at 11:30 p.m., waiting for registration to open. I was prepared. I had made a couple schedules that I would be satisfied with, all different times and my non-major classes were switched up between the three.
At a quarter of, I started getting antsy, just like I did before registering last semester. But that’s okay, I’m sure it happens to all of us. I turned my iTunes off so I could concentrate better. I started prioritizing in my mind which CRNs I would enter first to have those classes process faster. There were ten minutes left to wait before registration opened and I could finally schedule.
With two minutes to go, I got kicked off the portal for some strange reason. While I was freaking out trying to sign back in and figure out plan B, the same thing happened to my roommate and the girls across the hall. What was going on? Not only was I now worried about getting classes that were actually required, I was worried about the classes that I needed to get into that had less than ten spots open in them. Midnight came and went. Then 12:15 a.m. passed by.
By 12:30 a.m., I was still trying fruitlessly to get logged in, but nothing was changing: refresh, nothing. I finally moved from my computer to breathe a little easier, and then came back calmed down. After another minute, the portal homepage opened, and I immediately went to work. Not surprisingly, two of the classes I wanted were closed. I got my major classes, but what else was I supposed to take? So far, I only had classes Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. While that sounds amazing to most people, it sounded to me like a waste of time.
I understand that seniority is important in the registration process, so older students can finish their degrees, so I’m not disagreeing with that. Something needs to be done about the slow and faulty connections. I’m all for online registration because of its convenience and speed, but obviously the portal cannot handle the influx of people that all get on at midnight. It becomes a disastrous situation.
Alphabetical registration won’t work: the good professor’s would only have students whose last names began with an A or a B on their rosters, and the Zs would be stuck in classes that they don’t need. And then what happens to the unfortunate students with last names in the middle of the alphabet like me?
A lottery seems like it could work out, similar to housing, where you would get a time slot to register. It would just be done by the luck of the draw, but still in order of class standing.
For right now, it seems that there is no solution to this strange problem that students seem to continuously run into. Either way, next year, a new class of freshman will be having the same problem.