I’m a sophomore: First-year students should not be registering before me

As a student not granted priority registration from the Honors College, Student Disability Services or other reasons, registration has always been a stressful time for me.

With junior status, I registered for this upcoming fall semester on April 21 at 7 a.m. The honors first-year students had already registered on April 9, along with the rest of the honors students. They had taken up many of the Miami Plan courses I still need.

According to my degree audit, after this semester, I will still need 15 credit hours for the Miami Plan. I have friends who are first-year students in the Honors College. In early April, many of them were asking me questions about registration and which professors to take. When they mentioned that they registered on April 9, I was shocked by how much earlier their time ticket was compared to mine.

Every semester, I meet with my adviser to plan out which classes I should take. During our last meeting in March, we planned to take a Signature Inquiry course that doubled as an Ethical Citizenship Miami Plan course. Come registration day, all of the courses that could fit into my schedule and would fulfill that Miami Plan requirement were full. Now I am waiting on a registration override request (ROR) for a class, and it probably will not get accepted.

I’m not sure if my ROR will be accepted because it's for a Miami Plan course that is supposed to have many alternatives. However, all the alternatives were already full by the time I registered.

I find that most of the time, when I mention RORs to underclass honors students, they seem to have never even heard of the option before. Generally, it seems that honors students have a much easier time getting into courses because they register so much earlier.

I am two semesters away from completing my history minor, but many of the classes to finish my minor are also filled with students fulfilling Miami Plan credits. Now I am most likely going to be stuck taking a history course that I am not truly interested in next semester. I decided to add on this minor, having certain courses in mind, and now it looks like I will not get to take some of them unless I rearrange the four-year schedule my adviser and I worked on.

How am I supposed to take the courses I am interested in to fulfill my requirements when there will always be honors first-year students registering before me? I understand that the Honors College comes with perks and priority registration. However, I still do not think the first-years in the Honors College should be registering before rising seniors.

In order to make the registration process fair, Miami University should avoid having all of the Honors College students register for classes on the same day. The best way to make registration less stressful is to have the honors section of each year register before the rest of the class. This way, registration is less stressful and still maintains the priority registration for the honors students.

gowansj@miamioh.edu

Jamie Gowans is a sophomore in the Farmer School of Business. She is a marketing major with a history minor. She has been a writer for The Miami Student since her first year.