It’s finally that time of year.
If you are reading this, you’re probably doing so while taking a break from packing all of your clothes into your laundry bag to go home this week for Thanksgiving, or for those of you who were brave enough to skip class altogether this week, from the comfort of your own home while your parents are spoiling the crap out of you after a likely much-needed two-month break from you.
And while I’ve been looking forward to this break just as much as the next student (and the Facebook updates from my semester school friends about their week-long breaks aren’t helping the anticipation), another welcome distraction from school the past few weeks has been registering for winter quarter classes. In my blog a few weeks ago I expressed my love-hate relationship with PASS, and this week I will be lamenting to you about my trials and tribulations with CPReg.
First of all, PASS is like filling out your application to some top-notch Ivy League school and feeling like that acceptance letter will come your way any day now, while CPReg is the cold reality of living at home for the next four plus years commuting to the local community college and sharing notes with teen moms and 30-year-old born-again dropouts. The point is, it never works out how you planned.
I can sum up my registration process in four words (rhyming, of course, to add a little holiday cheer): fixation, frustration, elation and vacation.
Fixation
I think this one was pretty much summed up in my last blog. By this point in the quarter, I am so sick of my classes (if you’re my professor, of course I’m not talking about YOUR class), that the prospect of creating a new schedule is not only a relief, but a welcome distraction from actually doing work for my current classes (I feel like a lot of us Mustang Daily staffers allude to never doing work … I’m not sure why we’re trusted with producing a daily paper).
So, I spent weeks forming the perfect schedule on PASS, and I should have known better what was bound to happen next …
Frustration
Way back in middle school we learned that every good story has complex turn of events, and this is certainly no exception. Let me just begin by telling you that this quarter I had the best rotation spot that I’ve ever had since I’ve been here: 9 a.m. on the second day. So, I thought I actually had a pretty solid chance at making my PASS schedule come to life.
WRONG. It seems like everyone and their mom jumped into the sketchy white priority van this quarter and hauled ass away with my classes. So, on the second day of registration, I secured the 11th spot on the waiting list for a 40-person class — what do you think the chances are of 11 people dropping that class?
So I frantically searched PASS for another class to take instead of kidding myself with the unlikelihood of getting off that wait list, and found another class that would just have to do for next quarter. But of course even that would have been too easy.
Nope. Wrong. Fail. Did you know CPreg only lets you register for 16 units? Well, lucky for me, one of the classes I have to take this quarter is five units (shout-out to CHEM 111!), AND every other class I have to take at Cal Poly is four units. So, keeping in mind that I’m trying to cram as many classes into my time here as possible (aka NOT taking 13 units of bowling), I was extremely frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t get more than 13 units.
Seriously, is there really a huge difference between 16 and 17 units? Well let me tell you there is, because that extra one unit was keeping me from getting into the classes I needed without the possibility of even getting on the waiting lists for them because they still had spots open — what a waste of a good registration spot.
At this point I saw myself waiting until open enrollment to enroll in some class with Cal Poly’s most hated teacher at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. (#firstworldproblems).
Elation
Well boys and girls, it turns out there was a light at the end of the registration drama tunnel. I explained my situation to the professor of the class I couldn’t get into (for which I had even more issues with prerequisites that I won’t even go into), and he said he’d give me a permission number. I guess he thought my arguments were intellectually-stimulating enough to merit a spot in his class next quarter. In other words, HUGE sigh of relief.
Vacation
Now that my registration fiasco has been resolved, I can focus on forgetting school for a few days and going home to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. But, unlike a lot of you, I don’t get to go home until Tuesday night, because I have to work, so you can have your precious Mustang Daily crossword puzzle on the ride home.
The things we do for our readers …