Camping out all morning to sign up for classes on CUNYfirst, I never thought there could be a system any worse. While most of the time I got priority in choosing my classes, so many times the website was either down, froze every two seconds, or took half an hour to load. But in the end, all we have to do is click on a course, add it to our course cart, and voila. Awfully stressed because of the smaller array of classes to choose from and endless lines at the Financial Aid office topped with never working escalators, I never thought I would be thankful to CUNY for such a seamless registration process until inscribing for classes at La Sorbonne in Paris.
To be fair, I attend La Sorbonne Nouvelle, the seemingly newer and improved version of the original institution. Paris 3, another name for the institution, even has a registration website and a Sorbonne version of Blackboard: iSorbonne.
To start, the administrative inscription: a physical process of handing in one's application to the department of interest ("Media and Communications" in my case.) This relatively easy step involves paying for one's Social Security (about 220 euros) and receiving a student ID. I must admit, the swanky Sorbonne ID and the so-called yearly tuition is quite formidable, but the process to get there is much infuriating. Before the desired department, lines begin physically piling up at least half-an-hour before the office opens after lunch. Ideally, the French hate lines so the order in which everyone arrives is immediately forgotten as the doors to the mysterious office open up.
The most important person one will need in the university sits in the office at each department (French: faculty): the SECRETARY. One cannot risk being rude to her if they want to get anything done, meaning graduate. Understandably, the process is a million times harder for an international student who does not exist in the university system nor speak the language fluently (that was me), but after three hours of waiting, shamelessly cutting in front of lines, and going back and forth between offices, I was officially a student of the university and did not have to demonstrate my American passport at the door.
Administrative inscription, however, does not guarantee "Pedagogic Inscription" (the actual courses.) Courses are posted on the wall - not a Facebook or online page, but a physical wall in front of each department about a week before courses begin. No descriptions, Ratemyprofessor.com ratings, classrooms, or times are available; one blindly physically inscribes by dropping the chosen classes into the mailbox of the secretary. Supposedly this process is doable online, but of course that's never the case. Here, once again you must convince the same secretary to sign you up for a course. Sometimes she will even send you to speak to the professor. The obviously more personal connection sometimes allows loopholes for problems that cannot be resolved on a website, but either way the process is even stressful for French students, as I heard while waiting. I have immediately adopted the tendency to complain and argue myself.
As a plus, one can legitimately meet friends while waiting on queue for one secretary and sometimes these students know even more than the representative. Not to hate on the secretaries because they are quite hard-working, but being the single person responsible for an entire department involves inconvenience and poor organization.
At the end of the day, more like three days of lines, I am signed up for five courses at Paris 3 with one that I never wanted and will not attend, and a few others where I do not appear on the attendance. Either way, pass or fail, having physically and emotionally experienced the close-to-Dark Ages process, I genuinely admire CUNY. While Paris has a few things on CUNY, like no homework and only a final, I am glad I don't have to communicate with secretaries at CCNY because somehow that seems even more stressful.
