Course registration for the summer and fall 2023 semesters has begun. Online undergraduate and graduate students’ class registration opened last week, and graduate, veterans, honors and athlete students’ opens this Thursday at 8:30 a.m.

Judy Chanyi is a success coordinator for psychology, behavioral sciences, and sports arts and entertainment management students. Often, her main concern is whether or not students check their emails before sending their advisors a question.

”We send out informational emails like, here’s your date to register and apparently nobody’s reading them,” Chanyi said. “We get a million emails asking the very thing that we put in our informational emails.”

The hour that scheduling opens, PointWeb often crashes. The IT department, which is in charge of handling these technical difficulties, was not able to respond in time for this article. 

Rebecca Scales is also a success coordinator; she looks after cinema arts, production and animation students. Like Chanyi and her colleagues, success coordinators are aware of this consistent issue with PointWeb during scheduling.

“Be patient if [PointWeb] is down for you; it’s down for all of us, you know,” Scales said.

Chanyi tells students that they should try and schedule the first hour that it is available but that students should not panic when the website does go down. 

“Don’t have your laptop, your phone, everything, trying to go into PointWeb because then that just makes it worse,” Chanyi said. “Just one thing: stay whatever you register on and then just be patient.”

If students do not register as soon as it is available, then they may end up pushing back their graduation date.

“Students kick it down the road, then they don’t end up getting maybe the class that they want or the time that they really want,” Chanyi said. “You know, then their schedule is all wonky and there’s not a whole lot that we can do about that; the departments set the caps. Once it’s filled, then it’s filled. They have the caps for a reason, so don’t get mad at us when it gets filled”

Venkat Kunapareddy is a senior electrical engineering major. He has experienced one instance where all of the seats in a required class were full and he needed the course to graduate. 

“There were a few occasions where I was registering quite late for a few courses, but then I was always able to get into them because it was basically holding my graduation back,” Kunapareddy said. “So they helped me to quickly get into those classes because my graduation would be on hold if that didn’t happen.” 

Bayli Clack is a sophomore cinema arts student; her department has sequential course requirements. It’s laid out like a “track” that the student must follow to graduate within four years. 

“Sometimes trying to get core classes that work with those classes [is difficult], because they’re only offered once a week,” Clack said. “If there’s something else I want to take sometimes I can’t do it until later in my education just because I have to follow the course curriculum.” 

Clack is an honors student in the cinema arts program.

“I get to register early, and that’s pretty nice to get my first choice of class before everyone else does,” Clack said. “But the site crashes a lot when I’m registering, so it gets a little frustrating.

However, some classes on a requirement sheet aren’t necessarily required for graduation. 

“We had one animation course that we’re not offering anymore, but it still shows up on degree requirement sheets for some reason,” Scales said. “So that’s tricky, where it’s like, you need it, but you don’t because we haven’t offered it in three years.“

If a senior needs a specific class to graduate, but it’s filled, Scales recommends reaching out to the professor to see if they can add an extra seat. Although she does not recommend this for a freshman. On the other hand, classes will get canceled at the last minute if there aren’t enough students enrolled in them.

“We have a couple of program guides or degree requirement sheets that have a couple of required classes that are very rarely or maybe never offered,” Chanyi said. “But we always substitute, I mean, we’re not going to jam anybody up from graduation.”

Freshman Alicia Bush is an English major, most of the complaints she’s heard about scheduling are related to PointWeb and its technical difficulties. She spoke about her own experience when it came to scheduling her classes.

“They do have a good handful of English classes to take, but I feel like there could be a lot more variety,” Bush said. “I just think it kind of all gets put towards Copa students most of the time.”

While success coordinators are assigned to and in charge of helping specific majors, during her office hours Scales’s door is open to anyone who needs help with scheduling. Although, there are certain restrictions that prevent her and other coordinators from helping individual students.

“We know that there are some restrictions for registration,” Scales said. “If you have a business hold, reach out to those offices because we can’t do anything about them. We want to help you register, but we can’t get around those, so it’s on the student to reach out.”

Senior course registration opens next Monday, March 20, juniors’ opens on March 22, sophomores’ on March 27, and freshman opens on March 29. Class level is determined by the cumulative earned credits as of the beginning of the spring 2023 semester. Classes are available for viewing on PointWeb now.