UR students have an endless amount of praise for their school. The weather is great (especially this time of year), teachers are excellent, and Dhall is very respectable as far as college dining services go. However, where there are positives, there must also be negatives, and the biggest negative for most UR students would be registration. The process is horrible for many reasons, and while I'd love to list some tips on how to conquer it, there are no proven strategies. So alas, here are the terrible stages of registration at the University of Richmond.
1. Advising Session
The horrors of registration start way before the actual morning. The dreaded email from your adviser appears in your Gmail account, and that's when you know it's registration season. The semester is just over halfway and you already have to start planning for next semester... what's up with that? The advising meeting will most likely be brief, as you have zero clue what to take, and your adviser in the philosophy department (who you got matched up with for no reason whatsoever) knows nothing about B-school courses.
2. Research
Time to plan out the schedule! Your laptop will most likely have the following tabs open: BannerWeb, UR Undergraduate Catalog, RateMyProfessor, and an article on what majors make the most money. If you're a freshman or sophomore, you will most likely look through BannerWeb in horror as you see that all the gen ed classes you wanted to take are already filled, and the ones left leave you baffled that there is enough to teach about, say, Indonesian theatre and music (two spots left in that one; get 'em while they're hot). Eventually, you have found 3.5 units and some backups, and backups to your backups, and backups to... okay, you get the point.
3. Good Morning
Your alarm clock rings at 6:30 a.m. You debate setting snooze but rethink the decision, realizing it may be too risky, the possibility of sleeping through it is too real. You lie in bed staring at the ceiling, letting the realization that you are up this early sink in. Your second alarm rings at 6:40. Game time.
4. WiFi Testing And Room Hunting
There are a bunch of myths about which spots on campus have the fastest WiFi, therefore leading to a smoother registration. I will not disclose those spots, because I will most likely be in one of them. By the time 6:50 rolls around, you should be in a seat with enough time to let ClearPass "make sure your system is healthy." Whip out those CRNs, and wait for the clock to strike 7 a.m.
5. Registration
Well, this is what it all comes down to. The clock hits 7 a.m., and you go into the registration screen. But before you get to the promised land, you will have to wait some amount of time between 30 seconds and 10 minutes to get to the screen. When the browser finally loads, you fumble your way through your CRNs, press submit, and wait for a laundry list of errors: 44539 is already full, 66892 is already full, 55284 and 44726 are during the same time slot. So much for planning. After a couple of rounds of guess and check, you end up with a schedule that includes two Friday classes and 9 a.m. classes every day.
Registration is one of the worst times to be a UR student, but it's just one morning. Overrides are still an option (as sparse as they may be), and although it is a flawed system, a lot of the time students still get into the classes they want to. But, for those that get really screwed by BannerWeb this week, Russian 102 and all the calculus classes have a ton of spots open. Have fun!
