After spending an amazing, relaxing weekend with family and friends. Reality hit me at about 10 o’clock last night. Course registration was in a little more than 24 hours and although I had everything planned out and a couple of work lists under my belt, I began to panic about how quickly the courses would fill up. Being new to UBC I had no idea of what to expect, I imagined millions of people clicking away and registering at 8:00 on the dot, which apparently did not seem to be the case.

First Time Course Registration

To all first year students… don’t worry most courses do not fill up all that quickly (unless they are the extremely small courses in which case pray for an early registration date). My registration time was at 1:15 today which was not as early as I had hoped. Another side note, if you have an online course that will bring your average up it probably will not enter the system on time to help push your registration time ahead…. frustrating for me. Panicking away that all courses would fill up and I would have no chance at getting a decent looking time table I decided to go over all my options so that I would be prepared in any worst case scenario. Being the perfectionist that I am I wrote up all the courses that I intended to take along with all of the potential times that I could take them at and roughly the amount of people in each class. That way, on one piece of paper I could pick and plan a variety of “kind” work lists for a couple of scenarios and if a course filled up during the day I could find a substitute time with relative ease. I would highly recommend doing this…. During the course of the day two of my courses turned into ones only available through a Standard Timetable, but fortunately my little bit of planning allowed me to easily find the courses that I needed at different times.

So now I have a near perfect schedule (I hope) with all my courses going from 10:00-3:30 most days, with an hours lunch break. Taking all of my courses on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and doing labs e.t.c Tuesday, Thursday makes sense to me. After being through various educational systems around the world I find that a little bit everyday works better for me than 3 hours once a week. After taking a lot of 7:30 in the morning classes back in high school the idea of starting class at 10:00 seems structured enough, but quite leisurely at the same time. That said apparently you are not allowed to take more than 32 credits per Winter session if you are in the faculty of arts… so I ran into a bit of a hiccup when I was unable to register for Psyc 102 in term 2. Hopefully I will be able to figure out a way around this by the time term 2 comes, but seen as it is a course with about 400 people in it I am not too too worried about it filling up before then! I am only planning on taking 5 courses per term which according to most people is tough, but the normal thing to do…  I don’t see why my particular course load is adding up to more credits than expected….strangely enough science and engineering students have a higher credit limit. Engineering students must take 35 credits for their first year.

Another thing that I would highly recommend is going to see the academic advisors. Especially if you have never really though about going to university before… I think high school counsellors might help you with this kind of if you are in Grade 12, but seen as I was pursuing my dance career I did not receive (or care to receive) much information… As I am planning on doing the dual degree in Arts and Engineering I went to see both academic advisors in the Arts and Engineering departments. Armed with little but an inkling about what credits, course selections, even faculties or degrees themselves were all about, the academic advisors helped me sort out which path I should take. Mary Murphy in the engineering department was amazing and especially helpful in that she took the time to help me figure out which courses I could use to fulfill some of the first year engineering requirements. Thanks to her I basically have my next two years planned out as long as I keep my marks high enough to qualify for the dual degree program. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a “real plan” which is both comforting yet scary at the same time. I would really recommend going to see the academic advisors if you are at all unsure about whether the courses/programs you are planning on taking will work for you.

Now that I am relieved of the initial stress of course registration I am looking forward to my courses next year… although I am seriously dreading Chemistry ahhh. Good luck to everyone out there still doing their course registration! I hope that it goes smoothly for you. <3