In mid-November after I signed up for my classes I heard about a sports writing class that was going to be offered. It is being taught by Mark Hyman, a writer for Business Week who covers the business of sports, the author of two books, Confessions of a Baseball Purist and Until it Hurts, and an occasional freelance writer for yahoo.com. As a sports writer for The Retriever Weekly with hopes of making it a career after college I was very interested and went to look it up right away. But the class was not on the schedule of classes online.
I did not think it was a big deal at the moment because of note just under the link of the schedule of classes saying:
“Please note that additional classes will be posted to the Spring 2010 schedule in the coming days and weeks. Please continue to check back for updates.”
Because I wanted to make sure I would get in the class I continued to check back just about every day. But that note has not come off and the class has yet to be online. To make sure that the class was actually available next semester I emailed Dr. Chris Corbett, a member of the English Department in charge of journalism. He said the class was available and actually empty.
I doubt there will be many chances to have a class taught by a professional sports writer of Hyman’s caliber, so why would they shut students off to this opportunity.
While the class is still not online I began to think of how many other classes were not online anymore. What if there is a class that a student needs to graduate that is not online?
With only two weeks left before the spring classes begin when will they think to actually update their class list so students can actually have a chance to sign up for certain classes that have not been put online yet?
But, my problems with the office of registrar go much further than that. In mid-December while I was looking at my class schedule I discovered a big problem- I was no longer registered in any of my classes.
I immediately contacted the Office of Registrar and they said there was nothing they could do because they system showed I dropped all my classes. The only thing they could advise me to do was talk to all the teachers of classes I was planning on taking and ask them to let me into the classes.
While I did manage to get into four of the classes I originally signed up for, I am the 11th person on a wait list of my final class, which was the class I was most looking forward to taking.
So make sure you are in all of your classes you want to take before it is too late.
But the issue with the Office of Registrar this winter has been unforgivable. They may still be working out the bugs in the new system but they are dealing with Students who are paying to attend UMBC. If I were planning to graduate in the spring, but I was kicked out of a class by the registrars system, or I was not even able to get in the class because it was not online, I would not be in a good situation, possibly making me return, and pay, for an extra semester of classes.
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