The season has come. Course registration is upon us. This period is filled with a variety of emotions: excitement, stress, and confusion — just to name a few.
Course registration lasts from April 13–21, with each class year given two consecutive days to register. In order to be cleared for the process, each student must be approved by their academic advisor. Until they can select their courses, students are invited to plan their ideal schedule — with backups in the event that seats in their first choices fill up — in Student Planning, where they are able to access next year’s course options, including the courses’ prerequisites, descriptions and professors.
In the process of course registration, some students, like potential theater and anthropology double major Izzy Haller ’26, have been planning ahead. She says, “for this next semester, I went through the entire course catalog…I had to make this super planned out schedule for myself… so I’ve created my perfect schedule at this point, and I’m happy with it. But there are some things I want to change around still.”
The push to organize partly comes from a place of reflection on last semester’s course registration process. Haller, a Jan who spent their first semester in London, reflects, “I needed help starting.” When she got to campus, she recalls having to change many classes, with not many options open to her when the time came to do so.
In some ways, despite Haller’s organizational success, they wish the school helped them build a spreadsheet like the one they created. “I also wish that the requirements for each major were clearer,” she stated. Although they did ultimately find the information they were looking for, they wish there was a way to “organize it so that you could check [classes] off for yourself and plan it.”
However, despite the stress that comes with the course registration process, many classes are speaking to students’ interests and encouraging their excitement for the semester to come. “I’m just loving the theater classes,” Haller says. “I’m really excited to take Theatricalism next semester and…Anthropology of Religion.”
According to Assistant Registrar Shannon Feller, the process is not too different from inside the Registrar’s Office as it seems to students from the outside. “The process is very similar on both sides,” she says, “It’s just that our office’s system interface looks different from what the students see and use.” Similarly, despite course options changing each semester and year, course registration hasn’t changed drastically, even under the influence of COVID. Feller notes, “Hamilton’s registration process hasn’t really changed much at all over the years. It’s been the same process since we implemented Self-Service/Student Planning several years ago, with the exception of the fact that we do more online than we did prior to COVID.”
