If you're anything like me, you've spent the last few days frantically tied to your computer. Or perhaps your registration time is a little later and you are soon to undergo this harrowing experience. Let me describe the situation.
You've been scanning the WebCenter course listings pages for next semester's classes and navigating a labyrinth of Tufts-related pages. You know that somewhere in cyberspace, some magic page will reveal the hidden secrets to your major's requirements. But the TuftsLife.com search engine mocks you and inexplicably links you to the athletics department page at every turn.
Eventually, after battling with broken links on your department's site, you finally work your way to a likely page and realize an hour later that this site lists requirements that are defunct as of 2004.
You attempt to use the new Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS), but the system seems to be down between the hours of 3:00 p.m. to 2:54 p.m. over every 24-hour period. When you finally log on, you realize that DARS has not yet incorporated your area of studies into the system anyway.
Perhaps you finally manage to form a vague idea of what you have completed and have yet to do for your major. You locate the current course listings, realize the two courses you want meet in overlapping blocks, and realize that another is only offered every other year. Apparently, the scheduling gods have not chosen 2007 as an auspicious year for seminar courses.
Then you repeat this process with your minor or second major, only to find yourself chewing through your computer's power cord.
You contemplate dropping out of school and working on an alpaca ranch in Chile.
Of course, all this depends on if you know what you'll major in. If not, maybe you find the list of departments and close your eyes and click at random (not as though that's how I found my major - I pulled slips of paper out of a hat).
And then comes the time to examine general distribution requirements. You hate math, as all logical people do, and you will yourself to go back in time and take - no, pass - the AP Calculus exam in high school. You chew the power cord again to see if that helps. When that fails, you wonder if you should sacrifice your Friday mornings to Symmetry or sell your soul to the Stats devil.
You arrive at a particularly frustrating point when you look at your cultural requirements.
You went abroad to a small, Eastern European country and took immersion courses there, but Tufts does not have a department specializing in the study of this small, Eastern European country. You pray to the scheduling gods that this does not matter, and you burn a copy of the course bulletin as an offering.
Then your computer rebels. You've wrangled your Internet browser into showing no less than seven pages at once, many of those pages tabbed. The browser "experiences a problem" and shuts down before you can bookmark all the necessary pages.
Eventually, you seek help. But perhaps your academic adviser answers your emails - the ones in which you posed multiple two-part questions - in one curt sentence.
Now it is two days before your registration date and your pleas to your dean for an emergency meeting are regarded as some kind of joke.
This brings you to the actual registration. Of course, the time conflicts with the class in which you have a quiz. Your professor says not to worry; one missed quiz won't affect your grade - too much.
You have created a word document or spreadsheet containing the courses you want to take, ordered by preference and likelihood of actually furthering your completion of requirements.
You decide to register at the library so you can run to your next class, but you've of course forgotten to e-mail the aforementioned file to yourself.
The Internet fails when you try to log in, and it suddenly occurs to you to wonder if your advisor has approved you for registration.
Or maybe it isn't as bad as all that.
Maybe you outlined all of your courses for each semester during the fall of your freshman year and find registration a stress-free, relaxing event.
More realistically, you can stockpile a stack of Add/Drop forms to keep on your person at all times come September.
