While all anyone wants to talk about now is how whether Bush robbed Gore of the presidential election or Gore robbed Bush, I will discuss something a bit more college oriented and even more of a pain in the bottom: registering for classes.

With the exception of the honors students who get to register for spring classes sometime in September, the process of arranging your classes can provide a students with major headaches. The first thing most students do is pull out their student plans and see which classes they need to take to move on in their respective majors. Next they pull out their booklets to see what classes are offered and at what times. This is where the first problem of the registration process comes into play.

No matter how diverse your class schedule, it never fails two of the classes you need are offered in only one section each and the times are the same. At this point you must decide which of the two classes you want to take first and slide the other back to the following year. Once you get done figuring out the timing nightmare and have all the classes you want to take in the order you want to take them, you meet the second and even more stressful problem of getting in.

About three days before you are scheduled to register, you pull up the schedule of classes on the Iowa State homepage. To your terror, you find half the classes you want are already full, and there are only about seven seats left in the other half. At this point many students run to their advisers begging for help. What these students do not realize is there are hundreds of other students who are doing exactly this same thing. No matter how good your adviser is, it is impossible to meet everyone’s needs. The most common answer given to advises is to keep checking Access Plus and see if a seat or two opens up at some point. While every once in a while this advice does actually work the student still does not have a set of classes to get into.

The student must then go back through their plan and try to find classes that will fulfill their major requirements. The best bet here is to write down every possible class that will work for you and then hope there are seats available in some of them. The major problem is now once again whether these classes will fit together timewise, and if there are still seats available. You get to worry about this for the next few days until finally it is time for you to actually register.

As you log into Access Plus with all your possible schedules laid out in front of you, you keep your fingers crossed in the hope one of them will actually work. The more classes you get into the more confident you become that for once you might get a schedule that will work out. Finally you open the link for your final class and see the word closed in big red letters where there was the number nine open the night before. If you are anything like me the initial response to this sight is to break into a long line of swear words and disgust at the realization that once again the system at Iowa State has put you between a rock and a hard place.

We have been told that if we sign a four year pledge towards graduation and carry the grades to achieve the pledge we will be placed in the appropriate classes to get this goal accomplished. While this sounds like a great plan and most advisors help students to get into their desired classes if at all possible it is very difficult. Most majors have preset requirements that must be fulfilled and yet for one reason or another only one or two sections of that class are offered per semester. The worst part about this is most of these classes are prerequisites for upper level classes. So if you can’t get into your desired class you are not only pushed back one semester, you can be pushed back two or more.

There is no fool-proof plan to get around these problems. You can have people with earlier registration dates save classes for you or hope some people will eventually drop, but neither solution is guaranteed.

The only way to be sure to get the classes you need is to get good enough grades to become an honors student. For those of you who are reading this column and have not registered yet I wish you good luck, you’re gonna need it.