It’s that time of year again. A time of mass frustration and mediocrity. A time that will heavily influence all of our futures as the result of a butterfly effect on a scale that we will probably never fully comprehend: it’s time to schedule courses for next semester.

Point Park is a school that is surrounded by a negativity bubble. It sometimes seems that every less-than-ideal outcome or circumstance is inflated by the university community. Something that we as a whole need to work on as a student body is accepting that not everything here is going to be perfect. But, more importantly, something that the university itself needs to work on is the scheduling process.

Every year, scheduling is a nightmare. When the ability to add courses opens up to students, PointWeb consistently struggles to work properly and is almost always overloaded by everyone in each respective scheduling group logging in at the same time. Sometimes, the university will lock students out of scheduling without properly notifying them that they’ve been locked out.

Another major issue with the scheduling process is that the university does not offer enough classes. Many students, especially seniors, have expressed their frustrations with classes they need to fulfill graduation requirements not being offered. This can lead to meetings with advisors and a series of substitutions in an attempt to satisfy university expectations. This, in turn, produces further frustrations, as the university doesn’t offer opportunities for students to meet those expectations with limited course offerings.

At the end of the day, most issues students have with their classes stem back to the scheduling process not being adequate. Ending up in a class you didn’t want to take can hurt your GPA and having classes scheduled in inconvenient time slots can end up wrecking your day-to-day lifestyle.

Overall, the biggest issue with scheduling is the lackadaisical approach people take to it. For too long, scheduling has been a regular issue of “that sucked, but at least we don’t have to worry about it until next semester.” The university needs to acknowledge that its subpar scheduling experience has effects outside of just the immediate scheduling experience.