Let’s Talk Registration

I enjoy my new staff position on the Rotunda. I am now the editor responsible for layout out most of the pages and doing the final grammatical edit of the finished product before we export the pages. Though it is what I love, I am in the office with my fellow staff members until the wee hours of the morning. That’s just some background on how the morning prior to registration went.

I woke up at 5:45 a.m., an hour after I had gotten home from the office, and got all of my numbers typed into the designated registration page like my peer mentors advised me to do. That way, I could click submit right at 6. I did so.

Let me offer you some insight into my course plan for spring semester. I had five classes in mind, and two of them had fewer than ten seats available. Upperclassmen, athletes, and honors students get to register first; freshmen are last. In my mind, this meant that the other 1,000 freshmen were surely going to want to be in the same classes as me, and I was subsequently doomed.

The page was loading. In some cases, the courses that you submit can take up to ten minutes to confirm and load into the next page. Well, mine took thirteen, and then it stopped loading. The following sequence of events was a blur as I felt my future had suddenly turn into a black hole. (Obviously, I was being a little dramatic.) It happened like this: I refreshed, the screen went white, I refreshed again, a screen came up that said “server failed,” I exited, tried to log back in, and it told me my username was invalid.

    I was livid, and the conclusion of the situation was a reality that I don’t handle very well: out of my control. And so, I shot my adviser an e-mail saying I needed to meet with him ASAP to register for classes, turned my computer off, and went back to bed.

The hum of the distant Bedford Hall construction awoke me the next morning around eleven thirty. I contemplating rolling over and falling back asleep, considering I didn’t have class until three that day, but instead I made the conscious decision to check my e-mail first.

Of course, there was an e-mail from my adviser waiting for me in my inbox. It read, “Hello Sarah, come by my office this morning at eleven o’ clock and we’ll get it all sorted out.” My eyes narrowed like movie characters’ do when they see a natural disaster heading straight for where they’re standing. I muttered some choice words about my bad karma, got dressed, and headed out into the grey nor’easter weather toward the communications building.

My adviser was on his lunch break, inevitably, when I got there around eleven forty-five, so I sat outside of his office until he came back to drop his things off before his one o’ clock class. I sat patiently, dripping wet, until he came around the corner at a little after twelve thirty.

I apologized for my tardiness, explained the situation, and followed him into his office. Luckily, he was able to help me register before his next class. I got into three of the classes I needed, and I am still waiting on an override on the other two. He reassured me that not getting into the exact classes you need right away is not the end of the world, and that everything would work itself out.

Knowing that he does sometimes read this blog, I would like to again thank Dr. Rao very much for being so patient and helpful during my spring registration process.

 

Other Updates

1. At dinner on Tuesday, I spilled an entire bowl of Coco Puffs all over the table my roommate Emily and I were sitting at. She often cares far too much about what others think of her, and so to push her buttons, I took ten minutes to wash my hands and left her sitting at the table while the workers mopped up the milk and cereal from the ground. Needless to say, it was very funny. I sometimes take small opportunities to put Emily in embarrassing situations so that she will learn to not care as much as she does about everyone else’s opinion; I don’t do it to be mean, I do it so that she will learn to laugh at herself, which is a skill I think everyone should develop.

2. The photo below is our suitemate’s latest attempt to “stick it” to us. In case you can’t see, it is a tissue hanging on the empty toilet paper holder. They have obviously abandoned our alternating toilet paper system. I am absolutely heart-broken.