CC Self Service: Home of Registration.
It’s that wonderful time of year again. No, not the holiday season. This is an event more dreadful than that time Uncle Earl had one too many glasses of wine and tried to use the turkey to play football with the neighborhood kids. Put the stuffing down and brace yourselves: it’s time to register for spring semester classes.
Remember what happened last time you had to register for classes? You probably don’t because you tried to block out all of those memories or had them erased Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style. If that’s the case, let me tell you a little story to remind you.
It’s seven o’clock in the morning and alarms are simultaneously ringing around Conn, creating enough noise to wake anyone within a ten-mile radius except, for some reason, you. Call it bad luck or a very honed skill to ignore the annoying chime of your clock (which sounds a bit like an air raid drill). You don’t wake up for another fifteen minutes.
After a profuse amount of cursing and stumbling to find your glasses on the desk beside you, you start up your computer. Grabbing the list of classes you compiled last week and the accompanying course registration numbers, department codes, course numbers, credit hours, days and times on the “Preregistration Advising Form,” which your adviser signed (which is never submitted to anyone and therefore serves little purpose) you begin to grow impatient as your computer takes forever to boot up.
The clock says it’s 7:20 AM, and you’ve finally signed into the website. After a few attempts to log in, hoping there is a fluke in the system, you sit and wait for hours, or so it feels like. If you’re feeling ambitious, you might attempt to memorize the CRNs to speed up the typing and submitting process. You start to think about what will happen if you don’t make it into your first choice classes and immediately dismiss the crazy thought.
It’s now 7:30. You almost fall out of your chair as you scramble to type in the first class and hit submit. The computer freezes. There are too many people on the system at once and all hell breaks loose. You keep hitting submit. This does absolutely nothing, so you hit refresh, and the number is erased from the box. You consider throwing your laptop out the window, dropping out of college and joining the indie rock scene. Then the rational side of you (or your very concerned roommate) tells you to try again. You do, and it goes through. And…success! Congratulations, you received the last spot in Introduction to Mathematical Thought. Your roommate is pissed that there is no more room in the class.
One down, three to go. You type in the second number on your list, and a warning pops up: “Unfortunately, this class is already full. You were too slow. Better luck next time” (or something like that). You really wanted to take that Japanese history class, even though you’re going to be a physics and gender and women’s studies double major. Now what? Guess you could sign up for “Flowers From The Volcano”: Imperial Discourse, Eco-Feminism and Resistance in the Americas. Just kidding. It’s taught in Spanish (you’ve taken French and elementary German) and you realize you have no idea what eco-feminism could possibly mean. People around here seem to like international politics, so you sign up for a section of that. It works. Next, you stick with your strong points and sign up for Experimental Physics I. Now you have one spot left and a general education requirement to fill. You type in the number for Daoist Traditions because your Scottish friend is obsessed with Chinese philosophy and recommended the class, and after your computer freezes and reboots itself (for apparently no reason), you try again and score a spot. You’re finished. You have four (random) classes for next semester. It’s already 7:50 and you have an eight o’clock class. Crawl back into bed? Check.
No, that wasn’t a bad dream. That was a somewhat true story based on most students’ accounts of registering for classes. (Sometimes, laptops are actually thrown across dorm rooms.) Hopefully, next week, things will run more smoothly. But they probably won’t. Not everyone will be admitted into all of their first choice classes, and computers will freeze more than you did last night when your roommate left the window open and it snowed. I can’t help with those issues, but I can point out some classes you may want to keep in mind as back-ups.
Interested in the supernatural? Vampires, Miracles, Ghosts and God(s): The Supernatural in American Popular Culture sounds like an interesting course. Described in the course catalog as “a study of popular culture from the 1960s to the present,” the class explores “how Americans use supernatural and religious beings, events, symbols and ideas to think about complex issues and identities.” But be warned Twilight fans: Meyer’s series, while not containing nearly enough complexity to be studied in a college course, will be read. While we’re on the subject, let’s be serious. If the Cullens’ only reason for not going out into the sunlight is because they sparkle, they were never real vampires anyway.
Have you ever been in a situation where you couldn’t decide which was better—the Louvre or the Waffle House Museum in Decatur, Georgia? Lucky for you, all your troubles will be over if you sign up for Debating Museums, an art history course. The course includes “selected case studies of controversial museums and exhibitions, including topics on censorship, pornography, discrimination, racism, nationalism” and a few other topics. So maybe the Waffle House Museum or the Hobo Museum in Iowa won’t make it into class discussions, but it still sounds like a fascinating class.
Last on the list of potential back-ups: everyone’s favorite folk singer Bob Dylan has a whole class dedicated to him. Thankfully, the course will be taught in Standard English, not the drunken growls and wheezes that Dylan is so accustomed to nowadays. Though, having a whole class taught in the style of Dylan’s gibberish would be quite the adventure. If you can’t understand the lecture, your grades will be a-changin’ and probably not for the better.
Hopefully my suggestions have proven helpful, but as is usually the case, don’t be surprised if these classes fill up before your computer decides to let you log on. Remember to set your alarms and remain calm under the intense amount of pressure this morning will cause you. And once it’s over, you always have those crazy holiday festivities to look forward to. Just keep Earl away from the punch bowl. •
