One minute. That’s the time that it took me to register for classes this week. And while that might seem a little extreme and dramatic, it’s a necessary approach to getting into the classes I want. Anything more than a minute and you are most definitely wait-listed or never getting in all together.
How is that possible, one might ask? Well, there are a lot of students and limited seats. And when classes fill up in 45 seconds (yes, that happened), planning and constantly pressing refresh between 7:25 and 7:30 a.m. are the only way around that.
With that, let me give you some tips and tricks on how to win the bull race on registration morning:
- Create a schedule ahead of time: Again, this seems like a given but I know students that have waited until the morning of registration to really dig deep into the class offerings. They learned the hard way that waiting is a losing approach. So, don’t be a loser and spend time looking through the listing of classes, figuring out what days and times work for you, and making a schedule.
- Attend the advising sessions: I found this particularly helpful the first semester that I had to register since the program director (the infamous Jan Snow) not only has several class recommendations but can answer any questions you have related to graduation requirements. As an FYI, a PMBA student needs 54 credit hours to graduate.
- Use the registration worksheet: If you’re not using this, you’re doing registration wrong. To the point that I’ve included a screenshot below so that you know where to find the worksheet and what it looks like.
Registration Worksheet. The answer to all your registration problems.
What it does is allow you to bookmark classes while you’re working on the first bullet of this post (ha!) that will automatically populate in the registration tab the morning of registration. From there, all you do is go down the list and click “add course.” Boom! You register in a minute.
As a side note, I registered for my last semester this week and I couldn’t be happier. The first reason is to cross “Get an MBA” off my life to-do list. The second is to never have to stress about registration again.
Image: computer laptop keyboard HP Pavilion Entertainment PC, Carissa Rogers, Flickr Creative Commons
