Signing Up For Classes

When it's time to sign up for classes, hearts race, adrenaline courses and nerves take over. As the time for signing up for classes draws nearer, people begin to check Course Availability more and more - right until it's time to sign up and then people are just on the page to sign up hitting refresh repeatedly.

Once classes are signed up for, a wave of relief as well as disappointment blankets the campus. Then, a few moments later people rush to their phones and emails or to department chairs and start requesting overrides so that they can get into the classes they want.

Some of the most unlikely classes will get filled while others will have many open spots remaining (ie Calculus III fills up but other classes have 30+ spots open).

In the weeks before sign-up time, people draft up a dozen "perfect" schedules that combine either the most easy classes, the most GE classes, the most core classes or most time efficient. 

As seniors sign up people get a little more realistic and make minor compromises and changes to their schedules but often find that some perfect schedule still exists for them. Freshmen often have it the worst, by the time they get to sign up their schedule resembles a hodgepodge of classes that meet the minimum standard of 'still have some spots left'.

One group has it worse than the freshmen: the transfer students. When we first arrive at the college, it's after all the classes have been chosen and only the unwanted scraps are wanted. 

Sometimes it works out and with enough overrides you can manage a half-way decent schedule. Some classes are pretty much designed to be those left over classes for transfer students so that they can congregate and commiserate in communal understanding of each other's difficulties.

I'm not saying that transferring is a bad choice, it often works out but sometimes you'll have to wait a semester to reap the benefits.

There are some fun perks of being a transfer student, a) when you're in your final semester at a school, just before you transfer, you get to watch everyone around you become anxious about their classes while you can relax and enjoy the serenity of knowing that you don't have to sign up for classes yet and b) when you do sign up for classes, there isn't the same hunt, you aren't competing against thousands of other people - you don't have to worry about the servers crashing mid-signing up - and so you can go into the whole process a little relaxed and calm about the whole ordeal.

Of course, when next semester's signing up time rolls around: The hunt is on!

from Google Images