Well, it seems like we've hit the home stretch, folks. With the weather slowly but surely improving to near-Florida standards, magical things are happening on Homewood Campus (with or without the recent 'shroom imports from Kentucky). Soon, those Seasonal Affective Disorder blues will be gone, the birds and the bees will be out in full swarm, and Spring Fair -- and more importantly, the Spring Fair Beer Garden -- will soon be upon us. I look forward to vomiting on each and every one of you before profaning members of your immediate family. But before that, we have some pressing business to attend to -- namely, online registration for Fall 2002.
Now, imagine if you will a student at the beginning of this Spring semester, an impressionable, 21-year-old double major in Writing Sems and Psychology, the typical Hopkins student with slightly bigger hair. From previous experience, he knows that getting the right schedule can either make or break a semester, but as a double major, there's little breathing room for lunch breaks or free afternoons. This student, now a junior, doesn't want to spend a fifth year in Baltimore, though he finds the crab cakes and cheap crack definite plusses to life in Charm City.
By now, you might have guessed that I was this disillusioned young lad, happy to leave my academic life to the Registrar's Office. After all, why shouldn't I have trusted the registrar? I had filled out form after form, making sure that all sorts of declarations, proclamations, and waivers were in order, cutting down small forests to keep the paperwork churning. And that wasn't even the beginning. I had to track down and get the signatures of my faculty advisor, my academic advisor, my department heads, my professors, my parents, my landlord, my rabbi and the kid I used to beat up in the second grade, all to ensure that I'd get into good courses and my next semester would go smoothly.
In the past, I have discovered what a fool I was for leaving my future in the hands of a system that rivals Eastern European nations in its level of inefficiency. This realization came at the beginning of this semester, when I first went to purchase my textbooks at the Gilman Bookstore. When I got to my mailbox, conveniently located next to the bookstore, I realized that I hadn't received a copy of my registration. Not a problem, I thought, as I walked over to the Registrar's Office, confident that something small had kept them from mailing me a paper copy of my registration.
When I got there, I was informed that they had this wonderful new system in place, whereby one of the most important pieces of paper a student receives, his course listings, can now be found online. Now I know that many students (mainly in the Comp. Sci. Department) are ecstatic with these changes. But for me, the proud owner of a 1974 Silver-Reed typewriter, a really slick abacus, and the Macintosh Performa I got for my Bar Mitzvah, the new online registration system had created many headaches during the first days of classes.
Thus, for most of this semester, I've been working on a solution to all of these problems with online registration. The first part of my solution is to drop all pretenses as far as the Academic Advising office is concerned. I have no particular complaints with Academic Advising, and I thank goodness that I have Dean Saunders on my side. But the paperwork, oy, the paperwork! Now, in addition to having to get most of our courses signed for, we also have to meet with our faculty advisors and get cleared with a graduation checklist. Though this process was rather easy for me, it took some of my classmates several days and multiple seizure-inducing conversations as to how close their advisors thought they were to graduating.
As a solution to this problem: that the Office of the Registrars and Academic Advising be combined and renamed, "The Ministry for the Creation of Unnecessary Paperwork and the Destruction of Important Documents."
In the words of my fifth grade History teacher, "When in doubt, get someone else to do it." In the spirit of this maxim, the only solution I could find to the problem of actually getting myself registered for the upcoming semester was to find a tech-guru guardian angel to hold my hand (sometimes literally) through this harrowing process.
That's right. I'm talking about Andrew Pinzler. Some of you don't know Pinzler. Some of you just don't know his first name. Well, it's Andrew, as you may have guessed from three sentences ago. But I'm sure that my fellow members of the technologically unenlightened have somebody they turn to for their computing needs.
When Pinzler first met me, I was hopeless. I had recently acquired a new laptop, and kept on talking to it -- not the usual "You stupid computer" or "Why do you keep on fucking freezing," but rather such requests as "Computer, make me toast" or "Computer, three to beam up." (I used to watch a lot of Star Trek and currently consume large quantities of whiskey.)
With a little time and patience, your own guardian-Pinzler can help you with the trials and tribulations of Fall Registration 2002. So go on, Humanities majors! Get out there and find yourself a Pinzler! The Beer Garden's opening soon! I'll buy you a drink.
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