We’ve made it Bucknellians! Just a few more weeks until the end of the semester and then we’re home free for winter break. Professors may be turning up the heat despite the cold weather with major projects and final exams coming up, but one stress inducing event has already passed.

You know the one, where you have 20+ tabs open on your computer and are constantly questioning your chosen major. That’s right, course registration is finally over! 

Can you name one student who likes course registration? Probably not because other than exams and group projects, registering for classes always seems to cause chaos for students.

Starting weeks before the actual date, students have to schedule meetings with advisors and other professors to see what will work, major and time wise. Most students wouldn’t even meet with their advisors if it weren’t for the fact that there’s no other way to get their registration pin. 

Then they have to spend hours on end creating registration plans on Plan Ahead, searching for their desired classes and hoping they fit together in neat little schedules just to make registration easier the day of.

Shout out to all the students that don’t even want to touch Plan Ahead so they wait until the day before or morning of their registration slot to make their plans. It’s a risky move, but we respect it. 

But then, finally, the end is near and it’s actually time to register. No matter what time slot someone has, if they’re in class or not, anyone up to register will pull out their laptops and wait with baited breath for the moment they can submit their plan and all that stress will have been worth it.

Unless you can’t save because suddenly, one of your chosen classes is unavailable, there are no more seats left. No worries, just pull up another plan and you’re good to go! Sure, it wasn’t your first pick, but it’ll do.

But that won’t work either. So you try another, then another, and another, and suddenly you’re all out of plans, none of them work because at least one class in each is unavailable.

Smart students will check the day before for any issues, but those who don’t are left scrambling to make some sort of schedule and put themselves on the waitlists for the classes they desperately needed but were unavailable, all the while cursing the students who got to register ahead of them. 

We’ve all had this happen, other students’ selections leaving the rest of us to pick from the scraps. Many students report having stress induced nightmares in the weeks leading up to registration about that exact situation, literally losing sleep over the task.

Since other people got to register for the classes you wanted first, the lingering fear always remains of being in a class you hate, even if you get on a waitlist.