With April comes the battle for the perfect schedule as scheduled enrollment slowly begins to open for select students across campus.
Open enrollment for the upcoming fall and spring semesters didn’t officially begin until April 25, but classes have begun to fill up far before that date, which has left students frustrated and scrambling for replacement classes.
“When I went on for the fall semester, four out of five of the classes I wanted were already full. PSY 395, which I need for my major and need for graduation, was full,” psychology junior Rachel Davis said. “For the spring semester, there were two classes I couldn’t get into.”
Davis’ enrollment period opened sometime around April 14, though she said she didn’t actually begin her attempts at scheduling until a few days later.
For Davis, her options for alternate sections are very slim, given the fact she will be working a job next year that requires two afternoons a week to be completely free.
The Office of the Registrar’s website offers no information on how students are selected for early enrollment, and for many students, including Davis, the actual methodology behind enrollment periods is a mystery.
Associate registrar Kimberly Blair-Chambers said that scheduled enrollment opens on April 3, and is primarily prioritized by “group, then academic level, then projected credits.”
Priority enrollment goes to graduate students, followed by undergraduate students by class, lifelong learners, agriculture and veterinary technician certificates and, finally, those enrolled in the English Language Center. There is no preference based on college, except for students in the Honors College who are permitted to enroll at the beginning of the enrollment period, Blair-Chambers said.
Students are only able to use the course scheduling website to register for classes between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 p.m. on Sunday, which can severely limit enrollment opportunities for students like Davis who have busy schedules.
“Since it’s online I feel like it should be open all the time,” she said.
However, Blair-Chambers said the site has to go offline during weeknights for processing because of the technology and system the university uses.
For other students, the difficulty lies more in the schedules of the courses themselves than the class’s capacity.
Andrew Schneider is a history education senior with a double minor in English and geography who is now going into his fifth year, but he faced a monumental hurdle when going in to schedule his final two semesters.
Two of the required senior classes, which must be taken back-to-back, conflicted with other required classes he needed to schedule. The remaining section of a required social studies course, the only one that wouldn’t coincide with his other classes, was locked.
Schneider said he was told by his adviser that “the college of education was worried about numbers in the program” and would only unlock the section if it was deemed necessary, even though other students had approached the adviser with problems similar to Schneider.
“It was economically difficult to tell (my family) that I had to do a fifth year as it is,” he said. “So right now I’m basically praying that this section opens up and releases the anxiety that I already have built up with dealing with multiple final essays for my exam week.”
