Blood pumping adrenaline, a bit of underarm sweat, the fear of ambiguity and — at times — the feeling of total disdain. This is not describing a trip to the gym, but instead the nightmare that is class enrollment.
The buzz in the beginning of the semester always sounds like a broken record player year after year. Well into the second week of school, some students are still praying for a Hail Mary to receive a permission number into required classes.
Not having a set schedule or the courses necessary to graduate stunts the future success of students and keeps them in the university system longer. Those who cannot get into their needed classes pick up filler classes, accumulating more units. It’s a waste of their time and a waste of their money.
Students who aren’t able to immediately enroll in classes have no choice but to course crash.
Seniors like entrepreneurship major Andre Caminite are left at a stalemate due to communication errors between advising and the system that accepts course substitution applications. The prerequisites he took at a junior college had been accepted by one system, but left uncleared in another. This means he had no prerequisites, which meant he had no access to upper division business courses.
The fact of the matter is our student body is too large for the amount of faculty and physical space the university provides. For students like the course crasher, without a proper class schedule, financial aid is dropped and the domino effect trickles into other areas such as buying textbooks, living arrangements, food, etc.
All they can do is hope their number is called.
The course-crasher, like so many others, turned into a number to be reached on a waitlist.
As he sat in on a statistics class where he along with 22 other people waited in the hall for 50 minutes for the magic permission number, after which his professor informed them that only seniors with the most units would make it into the class.
On the first day of the semester, as students waded into classes, seats became scarce and those who straggled behind were left to the aisles and eventually the doorway.
One section of a course may hold 11 people on a waitlist, the second section 14 people, with the professor only capable of taking 10. This leaves 15 students to take on filler courses and to take on the status of ‘super senior.’
Save the accelerated heart rates for the stair climber, these students are trying to complete their education. We need help waking up from this nightmare.