PR: Primitive Registration

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

Now that I have registered at another school, I really appreciate the convenience and rapid registration of William and Mary despite the classes I never could enroll.  Wherever you decide to study abroad, it is imperative that you become well acquainted with your study abroad advisor. Nine times out of ten, they want to help you adjust to life abroad. My advisor, Isabela Coelho Knapp, is amazing and helped me with registration, finding school hosted trips, and faxing over the necessary paperwork—Confirmation of Classes Abroad—to William and Mary.

Despite her help, registration at the University of Exeter was still a pain.  In order to register for your modules, you have to physically trek across campus to your major department and pick up your personal pink sheet.  On this sacred pink paper, you write the module number and module name of all the classes you plan to take.  After this, you travel to each department which the module is located and ask the head of the department to sign by the module name. This means if you have three different classes in three different departments—like me—then you have to visit three different people to sign off on your pink sheet. Then once it is signed, you hand it in to your major department which is supposed to input it into the computer. However, you cannot always depend on people and if your modules do not show up in two days you should probably call the department.  Most likely you will get a response that goes something like this:

“Oh, I don’t know why you are in the system with one course let me put that in for you…” epic FAIL

At the University of Exeter, you have to take 60 credits during the semester. Therefore, a student can take either four 15 credit classes, two 30 credit classes, or two 15 credit classes

I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW PINK SHEET!

and one 30 credit course. However, when you register, you have to make sure you do not take a yearlong course.  I did not know yearlong classes existed so by the end of welcome

week, I wanted to rip up my pink sheet into microscopic pieces then burn them.

By week two of classes, I had dropped two classes because at one point I was taking too many credits and added one class because I was not taking enough.  Let’s just say, I registered for one course in the middle of the second week of class and had already missed a lecture. But, you have to be flexible and patient with this registration system.  Luckily, most professors are understanding even though you want to kick yourself. In conclusion, expect registration to be a terrible experience in England, because apparently this is a country-wide epidemic—my friend studying in Scotland said her registration was exactly the same way. But you have to take the good with the bad and honestly, the good outweighs the bad.

Cherrio,

Lover of Online Registration