It’s that time of the year again, when students are filling up their shopping carts and preparing for class registration. It's a stressful time for everyone, but each student has their own strategy.
Staff writer Vennela Medapati went around campus to find out what students think about registration and how they cope with the stress.
Annabeth Poe
Sophomore media and journalism major
“I think registration is one of the scariest times of the year, just because you have to decide what you want to do, first of all. Especially right now, I have no idea what I want to do and picking classes is really hard, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. This year I am doing it on my own. Last year, I relied on other people to help me, like advisers and my family. I used Coursicle this year, which I think is a really good program for people to use, just because it’s easier to find the classes you need. Last year when I went to register, the computer froze; it went like it was going to go through, but it froze. It took 15 to 30 seconds, which is enough time until you start to panic, and it finally worked. It was really stressful.”
Qinyu Huang
Senior statistics and analytics and economics major
"It’s my senior year so I only have some classes left, so I pick them. But I transferred to UNC and in my first year at UNC, I didn’t meet many prerequisites for some classes, and I couldn’t register for them. When the new semester came, I talked to the professor and said that, 'These are the classes I took. The credit cannot be transferred, so can I take this class?’"
Benjamin Clary
Junior environmental studies major
"I am never prepared for registration, and I do not like it very much. I think it is very tedious and not very well built, the system we have, and I almost always have problems. First year, first semester I basically got zero of the classes that I had in my shopping cart, and so I had to quickly scramble to find anything I could get into. And then I did very badly in those classes because I really shouldn’t have been in them."
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
First-year political science and public policy major
“To prepare for registration, I talk to my advisers a little bit. I talk to my friends and try to figure out what classes are good and what classes aren’t. I think about what I need for my majors, and then I just go from there. I pick whatever sounds fun. I spend a lot of time on the website looking at the descriptions of the different classes. It’s very loose, it’s not very formal. I always feel anxious around registration time because all of the classes either fill up so fast or they don’t open, or it’s the wrong semester. So that’s always frustrating. The first time I went to register for classes, I didn’t realize you only clicked the ones you wanted. So I clicked all of them and then pressed the button at 12 o-clock, and so of course my schedule didn’t go through. When I went back and realized what I had done wrong, all of them were gone. I had to pick just random classes and hope the other ones open up. But they did in the end and it all worked out.”
Ellie Baker
First-year English major
"I was actually up until about 3 a.m. last night just trying to get it to work. My difficulty was that a lot of the classes that you can find on the catalog weren’t available in the Connect Carolina. So it was really difficult just to parse through and just find out what was even available in order to find out what I could register for. And of course they are all at, like, 9:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So it was kind of a big logic puzzle. It would be really cool if the school noted when and in which semesters things were available. "
Eli Parker
Sophomore biology and anthropology major
"Well, I think registration is stupid and absurd and I don’t prepare for it. I just look at memes. I had very bad experiences because I spent the whole time looking at memes. "
