Fun fact: did you know that professors get just as stressed out about course registration as students do? Well of course they do! Student interest and enrollment rates often dictate which courses professors actually teach and which courses are kicked to the curb.

For classes like math, the sciences and business studies, it’s easy for professors to get high enrollment rates, especially with the structured course paths. But for the humanities, arts and social sciences, the enrollment rates tend to lower the higher level a course is. If professors want to ensure that the courses they want to teach will go on, the clear answer is to get more students to sign up. And as we get closer to registration day, the increasing amounts of flyers, emails and speeches in classes advertising different courses were only the beginning of the professors’ plans.

Most professors stick to these methods, the tried and true ads that get some students’ attention, but others are trying their hands at more modern schemes. Across campus, professors are picking up their phones and hyping up their available courses on YikYak’s anonymous forums. Knowing it’s the place where students spread information about upcoming events and share hot goss, professors have taken to the platform in hopes of drumming up word about their courses.

From groups of professors working together to post yaks and then commenting on each other’s posts to individual professors making multiple accounts, there are many ways professors utilize the app. Many of the posts are standard hype messages like “OMG I just love CSCI 204, the prof is sooooooo funny!!” or “gosh, I wish I could take GRMN 102 again :(,” attempting to appeal to the students’ interest with current lingo and emojis.

However, some professors have chosen the more direct route of copying and pasting their entire course description from the catalog and posting it directly to the main forums. The most popular, with one upvote, read: 15333 ENCW 101 Creative Writing WF 8:30-9:50 AM COLE 056, come learn to write.

It had seemed like a fool proof plan to the professors, infiltrating a platform the students were familiar with to bombard them with more class options. But the professors underestimated the student body’s tolerance for information they couldn’t care less about, and were shocked to see their yaks get continuously downvoted and ignored. Students even started to post their own yaks about how bizarre and annoying the situation was, some going as far as to post reviews of some of the classes being advertised, exposing how bad the course can be.

Warnings like “don’t take physics, it will CRUSH your soul,” and “my econ prof was the worst iykyk,” started to drown out the professors’ posts. Amidst the less than stellar reactions, professors have continued their campaigns as well as they can, but there are rumors floating around about them spreading to other sites like TikTok, Twitter and Reddit in hopes of achieving better results.