<p>Do we get to pick our professors for the classes? I've been told by several people to check Ratemyprofessor.com along with ourUMD.com, so do we get to pick our professors when we schedule for classes at orientation? </p>
<p>Well yes if the course offers multiple lectures, however, the popular professors will generally have a waitlist, so you’ll have to figure out a contingency plan if you can’t get off the waitlist. In addition to the sites you mentioned, also use myedu and umd course eval sites to get as many data points on professors as possible.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that you pick the professors. At least not directly. You pick courses and section and there is a professor identified for each one. But there may be day and time conflicts that force you into a certain section. You can also try the waitlist approach to get the professor, as da6onet said.</p>
<p>Note however, that sometimes the professor is not always listed for a given section. Sometimes they don’t know who is going to teach it, other times they plan on having someone who gets spectacular reviews teaching it but they don’t want students to know which lecture he teaches, so as to not overflow some sections while leaving others empty. Oh yeah, and TAs aren’t named on the sections, you’ll just have to take whoever happens to teach that section and put up with him/her, good or bad, understandable or not.
Also, be prepared to have a section switch professors after you’ve signed up for it: this happened to me in a physics class; I wanted a guy that I had the previous semester only for them to switch to another one, who wasn’t bad, but paled in comparison to the first one. I sacrificed marching band this year to get this class, and I was not happy. I’m putting marching band aside again to try to get this guy again this year, so hopefully this doesn’t happen twice…</p>
<p>I may be fortunate because my orientation was one of the first ones so I got in all the sections I wanted. You register for classes at orientation but when you get home you can tweak classes however you please.</p>