My Best Friend is CourseAvail

Registration week can be more stressful than finals

I’m not big into manifestation and crystals, but registration and CourseAvail have some sort of cosmic hold over me.

Every ten weeks, my mindset changes. I convince myself that the administrative gods of Santa Clara truly determine my destiny for the next quarter.

“You can’t always get what you want” is sometimes an adequate mindset when registering for classes and planning out a course schedule. However, it becomes a truly humbling experience when this is the reality every quarter.

Registration should not be such a stressful experience for students. Configuring a block schedule, limited offering of classes, maybe not the most ideal professor, a lab and an extra two-credit overload course turns out to be more of a complicated jigsaw puzzle than a mere class schedule.

It’s week seven, and I frankly don’t have the time to be coming up with plans B, C, D and E if plan A doesn’t work, or if CourseAvail only shows one or two open seats left.

In a cutthroat time like this, I consider you an amateur if your CourseAvail settings are not refreshing the number of class seats every thirty seconds, compared to the slow, automated ninety second refresh feature.

Pro tip: turn your computer clock to show seconds when your registration time comes up. But this is the problem with registration and how stressful it gets — we shouldn’t have to be trying to cheat the system just to get into a class. I tell myself I won’t waste a literal second when I register for classes, but it's always tough when you see that yellow waitlist symbol instead of green check on ecampus.

The registration system needs adjustment. The business school freshmen shouldn’t have such a hard time getting into a Math 9 class or only getting the opportunity now, their spring quarter, to take an Econ 1 class.

Similarly, students should not be rewarded for overloading their schedule one quarter just to get a better registration time for the following quarter.

You are definitely not alone if you don’t get into the class you want or get the perfect schedule. However, students shouldn’t feel the need to sign up for a summer class or overload their units one quarter because they need to catch up on their four-year plan. The classes offered at Santa Clara should be reflective of courses that all students have to take if this four-year plan is as important as everyone says it is.

Registration is a grim fate and the power of positive thinking will probably not get me the schedule I want, either. But now, I’m genuinely considering investing in a few crystals to get me through the end of this week.