by Rebecca Dance
I’ve been registering for classes since 2019, and I’m on the final stretch. I’m a first semester senior registering for the classes for my last semester. My registration slot was supposed to be at 7:30 on Wednesday morning, and I slept right through it. Granted, my life is a little bit easier because I’m not registering myself for any of my own classes (they’re all input by the departments that I’m taking them with), but I understand this is an uncommon phenomenon.
I remember being panicky about classes, especially as I got older and I started running out of time to take certain classes before certain deadlines. It marked some of the more stressful days of my semester, especially when I found myself needing to register while also in the middle of something else, like a job or a class. I don’t encourage it, but I might have skipped class once or twice to make sure I was free during my class registration slot. This felt counterintuitive, but I always have extra free absences.
Watching the number of seats decrease as the days of registration pass, connecting and reconnecting to the Internet, rapidly reorganizing your schedule so that you can graduate on time when one plan is destroyed, accidentally signing out of Self-Service and needing to deal with two-factor authentication to get back into your account..it’s a dummy-proof method for inducing stress in college students. It’s not the only time I see a student hovering nervously over their mouse, but this is the only time of the year when I watch whole groups of students nervously watching their computers.
To anyone registering for classes this semester, I wish you the best of luck. May the force be with you, may you get into all the classes you want to get into, and may all of your plans may not descend into the fiery depths of Murphy’s Law.
I’m manifesting for all of you that nothing can go wrong so that nothing will go wrong.
