UW’s Registration Method Sucks.
My name is Jack Russillo and I’m a college freshman who just moved to the big city (Seattle) from a small town in the middle of nowhere. Every day I rate something on a scale of 1 to 100.
Today, I woke up from a deep slumber not once, but twice.
I woke up at 5:45 in the morning, which is much earlier than when I usually get up and start the day around 9. The reason for this is because I had to register for classes next quarter, and the best time to do that is at 6 a.m.
“Why is the best time for registration so early in the morning?”, you might ask. Well, due to my current freshman standing, I have one of the final registration windows out of the whole university. Since the University of Washington has so many students enrolled (over 60,000), I’m missing out on a few classes that I’d like to take, but can’t because they’re already full. It sucks.
The only class that I have left to take before I apply for my major (journalism) was full almost a week before my registration period. That means that I won’t have the opportunity to take that class until next school year, which I’m really not thrilled about.
But let’s get back to my actual experience registering for classes…
I already had my classes picked out and ready to register by the time I woke up early in the morning. I was intent on getting it done quickly so I could catch a couple more hours of sleep before my first class. In case you haven’t noticed, sleeping is very important to me.
I was sitting in front of my computer, waiting impatiently for the clock to read 6:00 so that I could register my classes. When that moment finally came, I clicked the “register” button. Then my heart skipped a beat.
After I tried to register my classes, a new page popped up that said I needed to fill out some forms regarding my insurance charges, dress, and if I wanted to donate to various organizations through the school. This was not what I was expecting to see at all. I was quite flustered. I filled out the forms as quickly as possible and hit “register” again. This time, however, a new message came onto my screen.
It was an error message saying how the system had crashed. This was far from what I wanted to be doing at 6 in the morning… After multiple attempts at refreshing the page and filling out the previous forms once more, I was finally able to declare myself registered for classes for the next quarter.
To me, it seems like there’s definitely an easier way for students to register for classes. I mean, did they really have to choose such an early part of the day? I understand that there’s the chance that the server could be overused and crash, but nowadays that shouldn’t be an issue.
Also, I believe that I should at least have a chance to register for literally the most important class that I have yet to take at this point in my college career. But the class was full a week before I could even try! It’s bullshit.
I might just be cranky because I had to get up so early and didn’t sleep very well after I finally registered. That’s probably the case. But this process was definitely much more difficult than it should’ve been.
Jack’s Rating: 37/100
Pro: Aside from the error messages and forms that I had to fill out, the process is actually fairly simple.
Con: I didn’t get the most important class that I needed; I had to wake up early; and I nearly had a heart attack when the error messages popped up.
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