BY Ally Plezia
Staff Reporter
Starting in the beginning of April, undergraduate students registered for their fall 2019 classes. Using the new registration system, some students struggled to find available classes while navigating the new program.
“Registration this year was so frustrating,” said sophomore Marley Cook. “I’ve never had a problem registering until this year, and during my assigned time, I wasn’t able to get into all the classes that I needed to take.”
Colleague Self-Service, the new registration system, was built in hopes of making the registration process run more efficiently. However, for many students, the service’s technical issues made the process more stressful and hard to use.
“I had priority registration and still had trouble getting classes,” said freshman Megan McShane. “The system crashed for over 15 minutes and I had no way of fixing the problem in the moment.”
“After getting the website back up and clicking the register button, it took another 10 minutes for it to load my schedule,” said McShane. “Those 10 minutes caused me a great deal of stress.”
Sophomore Emma Wollweber faced similar technical problems during her designated registration time.
“This semester, registration was a mess,” said Wollweber. “The system crashed and wouldn’t allow me to register, so the registrar office had to register for me manually. Thankfully, I did get into all my classes that way.” Other students felt that the problems weren’t rooted from the new system, but the lack of classes being offered for the students in the fall.
“I didn’t think the new system was necessarily that bad,” said sophomore Jillian Krone. “It’s not the system that has the issue, it’s the number of available seats in each class and the limited classes for the number of students.”
“It’s not the system’s fault for the lack of courses being offered,” said Krone. If there was more availability, I think the process would have gone a lot smoother.” In a similar way, freshman Maisy Carvalho struggled getting into classes needed for her major.
“I can’t get into two of my classes, which happen to be my only major classes for next semester,” said Carvalho. “It is extremely frustrating that they haven’t accommodated to the amount of kids who go to this school.”
But there were also students who did not face the same issues, who thought that the new system worked more efficiently than Web Advisor.
“The new registration system is much better than Web Advisor,” said freshman Tyler Heinz. “It is much easier to understand and navigate.” The Colleague Self-Service allows students to navigate through available courses, create potential schedules, and view planned courses in a structured layout.
“The ability to plan our schedules far in advance and see how the schedule lays out is great,” said Heinz. “It was overall a really good process.”
“Many of the problems were due to technical difficulties and issues that can hopefully be fixed in time for next year,” said Krone. “Other than that, I think the new system was great and will just take time to get used to.”
