I was just curious lol. I’m at a CC and trying to find courses to match my work/life schedule is crazy difficult! I live in a suburb right next to a big city and my CC has around 10 campuses so I figured it would be easy to find courses at the campus near me, but it’s impossible! It doesn’t help that I have kind of an odd job where I have to work 2-7:30 so I can only take morning courses. One course that i’m required to take for my major is only offered at one campus, at one time, and it’s downtown during rush hour!
I just wanted to rant, I suppose. I’m having to take the majority of my courses online just because they aren’t offered at a campus a reasonable distance away or at a time i’m available. Is it like this at every college or is it just a problem with my CC? How do you guys deal with scheduling?
I work 8:15-4:45ish so I take evening classes but they all start at around 6 oclock. 7 is a bit of an awkward ending time. Are you trying to avoid classes that start early at like 8AM?
I found it really difficult to make my schedule for the fall - I got locked out of the calculus that I needed, so I had to totally replan everything. Thankfully I’m moving on from being an office assistant to a being a peer tutor, so I can now work in 1 hour chunks. This is great, since I don’t have any several-hour open chunks between 9 and 5 like the past few semesters, which is what I needed to work in the office. Now I can work in the time between classes
I’m sure I’ll run into this again in the future; I’m at a relatively small (5,000) university, so this isn’t the last time that I won’t get into a class that’t only offered at one time.
In my case, it’s such a pain. I am Chem. E major, Spanish minor AND premd, so I have to fit in so many classes even with bunch of AP credits that I brought from HS
I’m at a LAC (I’ll be a senior in the fall) and it hasn’t been that bad. Most of the problems i’ve had have been (somewhat) self-inflicted- I’m a double major (CS and Math), double minor (music and dance).
Course conflicts make me sad (which have only happened a handful of times), because figuring out when I can take something instead of when I was planning it is hard. Pretty much all my courses count for some requirement, so there’s a lot of shuffling involved when that happens. It also doesn’t help that since our class sizes are small and, because my departments I’m in are small, there’s usually only one section of the course and it may only be offer once every two years, so that’s kinda fun planning for as well. My arts departments don’t even publish a course rotation, but I lucked out in that I just took things as they were offered and that all happened to shake out fine.
Basically, I don’t get an option on what time my classes are. One section once every two years, or one section and its a prereq to another course I need, means I’m taking this now even if its at an awful time.
Scheduling freshman year is the worst. It gets better with each year. In junior and senior year usually you are taking classes restricted to students of your major and the class sizes tend to get smaller.
If you are going to a big university this is where being in an honors program helps because those students get priority registration.
Not necessarily; it depends upon the school. Like @guineagirl96 few classes above an intro level at my school are offered ever semester. Many upper level classes are only offered every 2 years, so planning ahead is key. But even then, class schedules have conflicts. Again, some of my issues are of my own doing due to major and minor.
It really depends on the school you are attending. Being able to get the classes you need to graduate in four years is something to consider when selecting schools. Dd attends a college with over 30,000 students. Since she is in the honors program she has always had priority registration so getting classes has not been an issue and she is doing engineering/premed where she had to fit in labs.
If you are limited as far as which classes you can register for because of work commitments it does limit what you can take.
@raclut I have priority registration at my university too because of my scholarship, but that doesn’t help when there’s only one section every two years, or if you’re in classes not with your peers. I came in ahead in both of my majors and for the first two years still had to get overrides and ask the department chair to let me into classes that were full so I could stay on track. These last couple semesters has been when my priority registration has helped- I was one of only 4 juniors to get into any 300-level CS elective this past semester. Our department is very good though about helping you if you need a course to graduate or if there are any other special circumstances.
It does depend on your school though. My school only has around 4,000 students, so obviously we aren’t going to have the kind of repetition in course offering that a college with 30,000 does. Each school has its own unique challenges with scheduling in my experience.
@guineagirl96 Most of daughter’s senior classes only have one section but then again they are restricted to students of her major. I am really happy that she is able to complete a 9 semester program in 8 semesters. For this reason I was really happy with her school choice. Careful planning with her school advisor helped a lot. I think for her upcoming fall semester it took hardly 10 minutes to register for her classes online. The advisor made sure she got the classes she needed. Though this university is very big on research the professors focus on teaching the undergraduate students.
Like I mentioned before each school handles scheduling differently.
My daughter is in high school but doing all cc classes. The way her college works is the earliest registration date you get is based on how many credits you have. Classes that everyone pretty much has to take such as college writing 1 has the most sections and the higher up classes usually taken by fewer people have way less options. Initially my daughter had to go through the dual enrollment people so registered later but now she registers just like any college student so she registers online as soon as her time opens up.
While she doesn’t have trouble getting into classes she has noticed that the 4 credit classes can be harder to work a schedule around then just 3 credit classes. In her case those are math and science classes. My daughter also has two afternoons she tries her best to avoid classes due to her high school figure skating activities. So far she has done that 3 semesters so hopefully it will work out her last semester as well.
However if my daughter couldn’t do classes 2-7 Monday through Friday it would drastically impact class availability. There are morning classes evening classes usually start between 5 and 7pm. Her school offers weekend classes including late Friday night, Saturday morning, and Sunday morning classes. She hasn’t tried for any of those but if her availability was more limited she might need to in order to take 5 classes a semester. We also have 7am classes which my daughter avoids though she likes 8am classes.
