Students, admin have mixed feelings on fall registration

Student Body President Adam Penland and Vice President Shruthi Vikraman built their platform with a heavy focus on improving course registration, a process many students last year said was slow, complicated and frustrating.

Penland said in an email to The Cluster before registration began that he expected it to “go just as well if not better” than last semester after IT made updates.

“Shruthi and I have been in contact with the IT department, similar to the way the Buckner/Onuh administration did,” he said. “We let IT know of previous problems with registration and have asked them to work with us to make registration faster.”

Students had mixed reactions towards class registration once it began Nov. 5.

“This year seemed similar to last year,” Daniel Tolbert, a senior production major, said. “A little more classes were available just due to my senior priority, but otherwise unchanged.”

For Emily Robertson, a junior history major, registration went smoothly.

“I thought registration this year went pretty well. I only had one minor issue, but the process itself only took about 15 minutes,” she said.

Executive Director of Auxiliary Services Kirk Bay oversees all student information systems, including online registration. Before the process began this fall, he said things hadn’t changed much since the spring semester.

“Basically all the problems that we had last year went away in March,” he said. “Nothing’s really changed.”

For junior holistic child major Jacquelynn Garcia, this was not the case. She said registration was still frustrating.

“I’m actually trying to register right now. It’s going, to be entirely honest, horribly,” she said.

Garcia said she was unable to add classes, and the process took her over 30 minutes.

“This is not efficient,” she said. “I’ve never met a single person that’s had a simple time with this or didn’t go into a full-blown panic and go through three mock schedules.”

Bay said the registration process is complicated, and the large number of students trying to access the site at once can overwhelm it.

He said 958 undergraduates registered for classes on the Macon campus Nov. 5, the first day of priority registration. That’s about a third of the entire campus population.

“It’s slow, but it’s doing a ton of things,” Bay said.