At the end of each semester, students must finish last-minute assignments and prepare for final exams. Adding to this stress is the hassle of having to schedule classes for the following semester-a task that has grown more strenuous over time. First, many students who seek guidance from an adviser regarding which classes to schedule often find that their mentors do not really provide helpful advice at all. Instead, advisers manage to change the degree requirements every time a particular student enters their office, leaving students to take classes they do not need, only to return to their advisers next semester confused and a step further from graduation.
This is better, however, than those advisers that do not help students at all. We can recall several occasions in which students have sought a professor’s help, only to be ignored or denied assistance. Ultimately, this leaves students to figure out for themselves what classes they should take, which can often result in poor planning.
We acknowledge that some advisers do take their jobs seriously and effectively mentor their students as they should, and we thank those who do. However, we ask that those advisers that turn students away seeking help and who cannot seem to master their discipline’s degree requirements realize that while their jobs are difficult, they only get paid because of the students they are supposed to be mentoring. Thus, they should respect their students enough to give them proper academic direction.
All too often ICAN, the University’s online system through which students schedule classes, decides to shut down for database backups about eight hours out of the day during scheduling week, leaving students without the resources necessary to schedule classes.
We know the University prioritizes scheduling via a student’s classification, allowing seniors to schedule first, juniors second and so forth. However, when ICAN is shut down the same day allotted to seniors for scheduling, it gives seniors less time to utilize the database before the system enables juniors to schedule. This is ultimately unfair to those students who trust that ICAN will give them 24 hours to schedule before the next classification in line snags classes they need to graduate.
As students, we also enjoy knowing which professors we are going to have before we schedule a certain class. It provides us with a sense of comfort when we can look forward to a professor’s class or prepare ourselves for the wrath of another’s. Some professors, naturally, do not mesh well with certain students. Their teaching styles might not be understandable to some students, or a student might want to take a professor he or she knows will offer a valuable learning experience.
However, the University often likes to leave the professors teaching certain classes as a surprise, replacing instructors’ names with a dreary “TBA” announcement. These classes are typically the last to go, as students flinch at the thought of not knowing which professors they will take. And even when the course schedule lists a particular professor’s name, students often attend class the first day to find a completely different instructor teaching the course, causing them to double check whether they are even in the right class.
We already do not know if we will make it through college or if we will get a job when we graduate. We would at least like to know which professors will be holding our futures in their hands for an entire semester.
And finally, when we can access ICAN, we often find the classes we found available in the University bulletin are not even available anymore. Students spend hours on end dissecting the course catalog to make the perfect academic schedule, only to find the classes they want to take are not only unavailable due to full classes, but oftentimes no longer exist. The University has not taught Japanese for several years. Let’s not get students’ hopes up.
Misleading course descriptions, unclear prerequisites, professor’s permission required-students have to deal with this every semester. And by the time we grasp an understanding of what classes we need to take and obtain the adequate prerequisites or permission from certain instructors, which can take days when professors are also dealing with final exam hassles, the classes are full.
We know that the end of the semester is a stressful time for everyone, students and teachers alike. However, we firmly believe that students are the future of our University, our state and our country, and serving them and assuring their academic needs are met should be of the utmost importance.
