Liz Hoffman | Dream classes never come true

I have always loved shopping for school supplies. I even have vivid memories of making my father sit through multiple renditions of my "look at all the school supplies we bought!" show-and-tell routine every fall. Poor guy.

Nothing was more fun than shopping for school supplies - until I got to college and started registering for classes.

I'm a big scheduling dork. I love poring over the timetable, seeing what classes are being offered in the upcoming semester and plugging various combinations into Microsoft Excel. Somehow, I manage to separate the scheduling from the actual work I'll be doing for those classes. I have an excellent time.

Unfortunately, various departments seem absolutely determined to suck all the fun out of scheduling. More importantly, they also want to make it impossible to fulfill both our major and general requirements.

As we move into advanced registration for spring 2007, I've heard constant complaints about too many classes in the same department being offered at the same times.

As a Political Science major, it is not inconceivable that I would want to take more than one 200-level class in one semester. Unfortunately, of the six 200-level classes offered this spring, three meet at 10:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and none meet on Monday or Wednesday. Other departments, such as History, Mathematics and Sociology, seem to be relying heavily on Tuesdays and Thursdays for their upper-level classes as well.

Hermione Granger, a character from the Harry Potter series, managed to take classes that met at the same time by using a Time-Turner, which allowed her to travel back in time. I'd love to take my cue from her, but the bookstore seems to be all out of Time-Turners.

It also seems like this spring timetable eerily resembles last year's, with nearly the exact same classes being offered. What happened to all those interesting courses I had seen in the Course Register? Perhaps they were just a ruse to trick me into majoring in political science, condemning me to an eternity of jam-packed Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And more than just the scheduling-obsessed students like myself have noticed these problems. College sophomore Alli Blum, who has only given the timetable a preliminary glance, also noticed that many of the classes she had planned on taking this spring are not being offered and that several others meet at the same time.

"Argumentation and Public Advocacy" with the well-known Kathleen Hall Jamieson looks like a great class in the Register. But I've never seen it in the timetable.

Part of this is our fault. We want to study everything. It's impossible for the Registrar's Office to compensate for the fact that we might want to take an anthropology seminar that meets at the same time as a chem lab. I'll cut them some slack in situations like these, but departments could at least give their own majors a break.

According to David Scheller, an official at the Registrar's Office, the task of choosing which classes to offer and what times they will be held falls primarily to departments. These timetables are then submitted to the Office of the Registrar, where everything comes together.

However, the only true oversight that happens at the University-wide level is when the Registrar's Office makes sure enough classrooms are available at each time slot. And because Penn has nearly an infinite supply of classrooms, that hardly seems like it should be a problem.

Maybe this is where the solution lies. Perhaps someone in the Registrar's Office should take a look at the timetable once all the departments submit their courses and make sure that classes are being evenly distributed throughout the week.

Of course, we'll all find classes to take. Even Blum seemed sure that, after shopping around during the first week of the semester, she would figure out a schedule that worked. And because I will probably change my schedule 37 times before the semester starts, so will I.

But the point of coming to a school like Penn is to be able to take advantage of a wide array of interesting courses both within and outside our majors - not to figure out the only classes in the entire school that fit in our schedules and that will let us graduate on time. The challenge of advanced registration should be deciding between all the classes we love because we're only allowed five per semester, not because it's physically impossible to take four classes on Tuesdays at 10:30.

Liz Hoffman is a College junior from New York. Her e-mail address is hoffman@dailypennsylvanian.com. She is a columnist for the 'DP' opinion blog, The Spin.

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