By Amani Dobson || Campus Life Editor
Over the past weeks, students have been meeting with advisors and registering classes for the fall semester. A semester that is still bringing much worry to the students. It is unclear whether or not we will be coming back to campus next semester or continuing online in the fall. Many students had to work their schedules around thosed facts. Lab requirements or dance classes will most likely be difficult to have online, so people have been avoiding them.
At least for me, the registration process felt immensely frantic. It became one more thing to add onto many. Trying to plan to get classes done for my major or even getting back up courses ready that would still satisfy my desires for the layout of my schedule. All of that was getting done on top of weekly papers, projects, and classes. Registration is always time consuming, but in the midst of a pandemic it was heightened.
A lot of the additional stress came from the fact that a lot of students, sophomores especially, did not receive the classes they had planned out. Because of the current global outbreak of COVID-19, a good portion of students planning to study abroad have cancelled last minute. That means that they needed to sign up for courses. Most of the students who study abroad are upperclassmen, so they got to pick their courses first, taking up more space in interesting classes and leaving less space for sophomores. Not only that, but many advisors recommended that students who were still thinking if going abroad should still register for classes in the event that their trip gets cancelled. Again, there were even more spaces in classes taken up as a backup for students who still want to go abroad.
Being a rising sophomore myself, I saw many of my friends stuck with classes they did not like or schedules that may not even work for them because of the fact that nearly all of the desirable classes filled within the initial days of registration. Although they will be just fine with the classes they were forced to take in the quick moments that they had to type codes into the system, they may not perform as well as they would have if they were placed into a course they were excited or passionate about.
Overall, course registration was fairly quick, stressful, and disappointing for the student body as a whole. It is a time of great confusion and uncertainty which can make even the simplest tasks feel like life or death. Keep pushing students, we are in the final stretch of the semester.
Freshman Amani Dobson is the Campus Life Editor. Her email is adobson@fandm.edu.