When it's not just a matter of course

I have filed my course card with the registrar. I share this with the Princeton community because it may well be my proudest accomplishment of the four months I have spent here. I remember when the card first arrived, a blank slate full of possibility and opportunity. By the time I finally rid myself of it, however, my course card had become a mess of erasures and cross-outs, a symbol of confusion, nerves and frustration. It is only appropriate, I suppose, that before my first semester at Princeton finished I learned an immutable — and ridiculous — truth: The most difficult part of a Princeton education is signing up for classes.

For a long time, I thought it was me. I was sure that only I was lost in advising meetings, thrown by course applications and limited enrollment and generally perplexed by the whole registration process. Slowly but surely, however, I began to hear the stories of other freshmen with similar problems. One friend went into his advising session with a balanced load of four courses and left with eight, including three in the politics department. Another was annoyed to discover that the seminar he had planned to take and its co-requisite met at the same time. Countless others simply gave up trying to figure out the difference between ST and STX or why some classes required course-card initialing. What we shared in our confusion was a realization that what should be a simple process is needlessly flawed.

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that we currently schedule our courses with pencil and paper, a fact that seems ridiculous in a world where I can order pizza or have dry cleaning picked up over the Internet. The problems with course selection at Princeton are even more basic than the system's Stone Age foundations. Indeed, some of the difficulties I have encountered in my quest to find second-semester courses are basic mistakes. A class meant to fill the STX distribution requirement is not designated as such in the course catalogue. Classes listed as not open to freshmen on the registrar's webpage are open to all in the printed catalogue of course offerings. Certainly, some errors are to be expected, but the problems with the course registration system don't even begin to end here.

As anyone who flips through a course catalogue can see, many Princeton classes require applications or interviews. While this is a reasonable policy, it is executed in a most frustrating manner. Most classes do not post their lists of admitted students until shortly before course cards are due, making it difficult to plan the rest of one's schedule, both in terms of meeting times and subject distributions. I cannot imagine a reason why such application processes could not begin earlier in the semester, leaving a comfortable time cushion between admittances and registration.

In addition, the advising system, which Princeton often touts as one of its strong suits, is also flawed. While there are many people available to offer advice, everyone seems to have different ideas. The most valuable resources in selecting classes and figuring out the registration labyrinth are other students. All freshmen have senior peer advisers. My peer adviser has been more helpful to me than any faculty member, and yet she is the person to whom I have the least access. A number of freshmen I spoke with didn't even know if they had peer advisers, let alone who they were. Advising help, particularly from students, is clearly something we who are new to Princeton need. Freshmen aren't born knowing how "web bidding" works or which classes are required to begin a finance certificate. Our faculty advisers, however, are often less than informed or less than available. By increasing access to peer advisers and offering more group sessions to explain topics like limited enrollment or balancing departmentals and distribution requirements, the administration could greatly help those of us who hate our blank course cards more and more each day.

Not long after I made my final trip to the registrar, a faculty member asked me if I had encountered any difficulties during my first semester at Princeton. I was hard pressed to think of anything negative. I feel at home on campus and in my Blair double. I am challenged by my classes, awed by the constant intellectual stimulation this University provides and excited by my extra-curricular activities. Most importantly, I have met many remarkably interesting people. My only complaint emanated from my course card and my seemingly endless quest to get it filled. Signing up for classes should be easy. With a few simple reforms, the University can make the registration process more a beginning than a battle. Katherine Reilly is from Short Hills, NJ. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.