Thursday, December 3, 2009

A Simple Course Enrollment Strategy

Today was course registration day for juniors, and with Princeton FML newly landed, you'd think that that site's just gonna be absolutely flooded by comments about kinda feeling you gotta haul that ass out of the bed at 7 in the morning. Or probably a few minutes before, just so you have enough time to wipe the crud out of your eyes and actually be able to see the site crashing.

SCORE, boi, why you trippin' like that? You think 'cause you trickin', you get it just like that?

Wait a minute.

So why was there was one, and only one, SCORE post on Princeton FML as of, what, 9:06-ish p.m.? There were things on the usual academic gripes, shirt-sleeve weather in December, finding out your insurance just ain't gonna cover that wild night when you had to be PMCed, pretending that bottle of yellow liquid by your bed is lemon-lime Powerade when it's some other kind of man-juice and accidentally calling President Tilghman a dude --- hey there, Shirley Dawg, wazzup? But only one SCORE post. Why?

I think it's because some juniors have simply begun to figure out one of those great secrets of life at Princeton: You just don't have to wake up that early to get into classes you want to get into.

I tried this strategy out this morning, after I woke up at 7:24, and said, "Oh my gosh, I'm late for this shit, but fuggetaboutit, whatever, I'mma back to sleep." So I wake up again at 10 a.m., and everyone who had tried to do SCORE was either off to class or back to a broken sleep. That meant no one was clogging up the tubes. For the first time here at Princeton, I registered for classes in two minutes. No kidding. There was zero hanging, zero worry, just smooth sailing.

Of course, that strategy's not good for people trying to take small classes. It also epic fails if you want that lab day or precept for a humongo-tastic class. But if your class isn't popular or if it doesn't post course limits, like that Harry Potter class they're teaching, well, don't sweat it. Last I heard this afternoon, 324 people were in that class, and sophomores and freshmen haven't even enrolled yet. Princeton Chapel, do I see you as the only classroom large enough for the Harry Potter class? The Gothic architecture there will fit the course nicely, don't you think?

Wake up later, do us and yourself a favor by not overloading SCORE, and just sleep. Hey, it's Princeton.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

haha, nice post. maybe I should actually read the prox once and a while...

Anonymous said...

"You just don't have to wake up that early to get into classes you want to get into."

This is probably due more to the fact that even the latest kid in our class gets to register before half the school than anything else.