By Katie Stobbart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 20, 2013
The most frustrating time of semester for me is not midterms or final exams. It’s not that eight-page paper due only a few days after a big test. It’s not even that moment when I realize there are two weeks left in the semester and there are four novel chapters, three all-nighters, two final papers, and a partridge in a pear tree waiting to be dealt with.
The most frustrating time of semester is registration.
Registration can be a little like The Hunger Games. Everyone’s gathered around the cornucopia of courses, eyeing up requirements for the next semester’s survival, evaluating which course will be the easiest to grab, or which ones every bloodthirsty student in your program will be all over. Supporting evidence: Shakespeare (ENGL 312, one of two courses offered in the winter that fulfill a degree requirement applicable to almost all English programs) has a waitlist of 21 people only a few days after registration began on November 12. By November 14, some courses were already almost full.
It’s a tense environment. Nobody wants to be stuck taking some lower-level course in a totally different discipline just to fill up the credits necessary to get student loan. Everyone is counting the credits until graduation, and some of us are thinking, “If I don’t get into this course this semester, I’m not going to graduate on time.” Nobody wants to be number 22 on a waitlist.
At any bursting-at-the-seams university struggling with a lack of funds to provide extra sections of vital courses, any glitch or delay in registration is magnified.
UFV warned students in advance to pay their $200 registration deposits early. “Pay your registration deposit 72 hours before registration,” is set in large font and all caps atop the Winter 2014 Quicklinks page. In smaller font: “Online banking payments can take up to three business days to be applied to your UFV account.” Since registration began, I’ve heard a number of frustrating stories. Some students just forgot to pay on time, some forgot Monday was a stat holiday and didn’t count as a business day, and some students who paid as early as the Wednesday before their Tuesday registration times had to go wait in line at OReg anyway and pay an additional $200 deposit if they wanted to register on time. This seems ironic to me considering that underneath that same 72-hour warning on OReg’s payment methods page, it says, “Don’t wait in line, pay online!”
It’s ridiculous that it should take three business days for a payment to be applied to my UFV account. It’s not the bank’s fault, either – the payment shows up on my account mere minutes after sending it to the payee, UFV. Computers are supposed to be faster than people – nearly instantaneous.
In a single day, I could begin my manual registration at UFV, walk to my bank through a foot of snow, battle a sasquatch, reach my bank, withdraw $200, walk back through two feet of snow to UFV, climb the stairs, wait in line for two hours outside the OReg office, make my payment, and register.
But it takes three days to click a few buttons and send it over the internet?
Something’s not right here.
Maybe I’m just missing some part of the process. There are a lot of students at UFV registering, after all, and it’s not like computers can be used to process large amounts of information all at once – oh, wait.
It just seems to me the registration payment process is a lot more convoluted than it needs to be, and involves a lot of unnecessary stress for everyone involved. Surely, with the advanced technology available to us, there is a way to take the frustration out of registration.
