Ryan ChartrandToday was the day! I woke up at 10:45 a.m., got out of bed, brushed my teeth and then I sat in front of my computer, anxiously watching the minutes tick away. At exactly 10:59 a.m., I logged onto the Cal Poly student Web site. The night before, I stayed up late, reviewing and analyzing all my possible class schedules and making sure that all my information was in order.
I was very anxious because I was unable to get into the classes I needed fall quarter. The schedule that I finally ended up with included classes that I didn’t really need and gave me a schedule from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. This quarter had to be better – not another disaster like my first experience.
I held my breath, put in all the numbers and clicked the “submit” button. No, not again! Just as I had feared, I was waitlisted for two of my required classes. My heart sank and I wasn’t sure what to do.
Unfortunately, every quarter, countless other Cal Poly students struggle with similar scheduling conflicts. ”
We pay to go to school here, we should at the very least have access to the classes we need,” freshman Jamie Buongiorno said. This is a common sentiment expressed by all the students I interviewed.
Cal Poly is negatively affecting students’ college careers by failing to provide enough classes to fulfill graduation requirements. Sophomore Kristen Webster faced this problem in too.
“During the fall quarter, I had the last registration time. All the classes I needed were full, so I ended up taking any open classes that I could find,” she said. Webster’s story is not uncommon. When students cannot get into the classes they need, they end up having to take one of the few random classes still open, if they can find any at all. Some students end up not even being full-time students or have to take courses through Cuesta Community College to fulfill required classes. Not only are these situations inconvenient, but they cost much more money.
When I was younger, I remember my mom’s friends talking about how college was the best four years of their lives. Unfortunately, at Cal Poly, college is becoming a four and a half or five-year process simply because there are not enough classes to accommodate the student body.
I, along with the students I talked to, don’t want to have to pay extra money on top of the already escalating tuition costs each quarter. Something needs to be done to make more classes available to the students.
According to the Cal Poly Web site, there are roughly 18,500 students at Cal Poly and only 1,203 faculty members. That’s an average of one professor to every 19 students. I am not sure what the problem is; however, it’s clear that it is negatively impacting the student body. As the number of Cal Poly students increases, the number of classes will have to do the same. Simply, the only way to solve this problem is to hire more professors and make more classes available.
In the process of researching this topic, I talked to numerous people in various situations, from randomly selected students, to the guy who made my coffee at Starbucks. Without a doubt, the one thing that they all agreed upon was that Cal Poly has a problem with the availability of classes, and that the problem needs to be fixed.
Allison Ramsey
Agribusiness freshman