This past week, students registered for winter quarter and the reception has been mixed. While some had no trouble registering and received the courses they wanted, others have not been so lucky.

For students who don’t have early registration and, thus, get assigned a random registration day and time, it’s really luck of the draw.  Even though it is somewhat determined by year – seniors have priority over juniors and juniors over sophomores and so on – there are some discrepancies. For example, there are freshmen who had Monday registration and ones who had Friday registration, and there are some freshmen who get Monday registration while a sophomore has to wait until Thursday. It isn’t a case of not getting your first choice classes but also not getting your second, third or fourth choices, either. I overheard one student expressing worry to her academic advisor because even though she was able to find courses to put together a schedule next quarter, none of them relate to her major or give her the credits she needs. She was stressed because DU costs so much money each quarter and she didn’t want to feel like she was wasting money on unneeded courses.

I personally have early registration, which is available to Honors Program students, athletes and those who have a disability accommodation. Because of this, I was able to get all the classes I wanted. I was lucky though, as it seems if you don’t have early registration, it’s an extremely stressful week seeing if you can even get just one class you want.

The biggest problem seems to be a discrepancy in number of class sections. When I was registering for fall classes, I was planning on taking German, but there were only two sections of elementary German, and they were both full. I ended up taking elementary Italian, for which there were several sections (at least five). I enjoy Italian very much, but it seemed odd that there was such a difference in the number of available classes for these two languages. There also seems to be much more available classes for math, business and science majors, while classes for journalism, English, theatre and other arts and humanities majors seem few and far between. Statistically, business and science majors are the most popular at DU, but that doesn’t mean that all of the other majors should have to fall by the wayside.

Staggering registration days is understandable; if everyone registered at once, the servers would crash and prevent everyone from registering. But there has to be a more efficient way of registering that allows students to get at least one class they need. More classes in general, as well as more sections of existing classes, should be added. Perhaps there should also be a system where every student gets to place a hold on one class they really want or need, so they at least have one course per quarter guaranteed. There shouldn’t be students wondering whether or not to come back next quarter because they didn’t get any of their required classes, and they don’t want to waste their money.