The Onion Dip Column is the satire section. All articles are not to be taken seriously.
It’s everyone’s favorite time of year again: registration season. Last week was just so much fun, making hundreds of backup schedules to prepare for the worst case scenario and counting down the minutes until 11:00 PM. It’s just like when we were kids, waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve or for school to let out for the summer. Who doesn’t love course registration?
But this year, the school just had to make things difficult and change the format. I don’t know what was wrong with the old way of doing registration. Even as a freshman, I got a spot in every single class I registered for. But this time, I didn’t get in a single class I wanted.
First, I got logged out of my account somehow. This didn’t seem like such a huge problem. All I had to do was log back in. But then I remembered I needed a Google Authenticator code, so that took an extra twenty minutes or so. After logging in and entering my pin, my computer froze on a loading screen. That horrible little wheel spun for 5 minutes before I could even see the registration page. Once it finally disappeared, I entered my CRNs and hit the “add to summary” button. The computer said my enrollment was pending. Okay, now that wasn’t so bad. I just had to wait to hear back from the professors and they would tell me my enrollment was confirmed.
Oh, wait. That’s not how registration works, is it? Apparently I had to click ANOTHER button. Seriously, what’s with all the buttons in this new registration format? How many buttons do we need? It makes so much more sense to enter the CRNs, hit ONE button to submit them, and be done. Someone please explain why we need 38 buttons just to confirm what courses we want.
They put the “submit” button in the lower right corner of the screen, which was the last place I looked. By the time I finally found the button and clicked it, the computer told me I couldn’t register for any of my courses because they were all full. This wasn’t surprising to me, considering it was 11:53 PM. I put myself on the waitlist for my classes and tried replacing them with my backups, but all of those were filled too! I had no idea what to do, so I went to sleep and waited until the next morning.
After class the next day, I checked my Spring 2024 schedule and saw there were four classes on it. Those classes weren’t on my backup schedules, and I never even tried to sign up for any of them. Somehow I ended up in Advanced Modern Dance. The only dance class I ever took was ballet when I was three years old, and I was so uncoordinated that the instructor told me to do something else instead. I was also signed up for oboe lessons. And it was Oboe 2. How am I supposed to take Oboe 2 if I’ve never even touched an oboe before? The next class on my schedule was computational mathematics. I don’t even know what that means. Is that another language? I was excited to see that the last class on my schedule was a 100 level, something easy to ease the burden of rigorous dancing and extremely confusing advanced math. But it was just Intro to Sociology, which I already took, and I really don’t want to take it again. Sociology bores me.
I’m an environmental science major, and I was hoping to sign up for at least some of the 15 classes I need to complete my major. I was already nervous on Wednesday morning when I saw all the junior and senior vultures had swooped in and taken all the seats in biostatistics. My backup schedules were still hopeful, though. I felt confident seeing that there were 16 seats open in Bio 200. But they just had to change the format of registration and confuse me. Instead, I’m taking sociology, dance, oboe, and computer math. Well, this should be a fun semester.
Sophomore Carrie Teti is a Staff Writer. Her email is cteti@fandm.edu.