Class Registration? How does it work?
It’s registration week at Loyola, which means a week of people panicking and being relieved in turns, of ducking out of classes for about two minutes to wait and wait for their requests to go through, and of arranging and re-arranging schedules, over and over again.
My mom likes to remind me she had to stand outside in lines to sign up for her classes. As stressful as this online system may be – I always use my phone, on data, to not get bogged down by a slow computer or worse – slow wifi – I can’t even imagine the stress levels that would bring about. Spend too much time in one line and can’t get to another class? But your backup is also full, and your backup’s backup only hinged on your first class being too full? Sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.
Luckily, several things at Loyola make it much easier. For one, if you are an Honors student, an athlete, a Resident Assistant, or disabled, you have early registration than the rest of your class, at different times. I don’t think it goes in that order. Second, seniors go before juniors, who have earlier times than sophomores, who (for the spring semester) are ahead of freshmen. So if you’re, say, a senior Resident Assistant, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a spot in all of the classes you want. How nice!
Loyola uses basically two sites: Sakai, and Locus. Sakai is sort of like Blackboard or Schoology, which your high schools might use, as a sort of classroom portal where professors can put resources, syllabuses, or assignment dropboxes as they wish. Some professors use it a lot, some not at all.
Locus is the business website, sort of. You can do a lot on there, from checking your grades to applying for graduation (eek!) to signing up for classes. I don’t know if it will show up very well, but here’s what mine looks like, as well as some of the classes I’ll be taking next semester. That’s right, your girl’s registration period opened up last Monday, bright and early at 9:15am, so I registered while walking to class!
It’s as easy as clicking buttons. Locus has this thing called the ‘Shopping Cart’ where basically you can put the classes that you want to take into it, so when registration comes around you don’t have to go looking for each class individually! Let me show you.
Of course, mine is empty because I registered for my classes already, but as you can see below, they’ve got little green check marks next to them. Whether you don’t get into a class because it’s full, you’re on the waitlist for a class, or you got in, Locus will tell you – none of that waiting around, or not knowing!
Some other features of Locus is the planner, where you can put in classes you’ll need for the future before your shopping cart is even open (it usually opens a few weeks before registration does), and – my favorite – the academics requirement report. Not to scare you but to comfort you, it tells you which classes you need to take to complete your major or your minor! It’s super handy. I don’t have to email my adviser for every little confusion and problem (although sometimes I do anyway, because my adviser is really cool and useful. I adore her, even though we’ve never met.)
So don’t worry, parents reading this, there’s no standing around biting your fingernails and planning strategic line-jumps with a card in your hand here at Loyola any more! I’m not so sure that there is any institution that does it like that anymore, although of course I can’t say definitively. If you’re looking at these blogs, hopefully you’re not stressed, but if you are – registration at whatever university you go to shouldn’t be one!