One of the most stressful times in an Emory girl’s academic career is course registration time–all thanks to OPUS. We all have a love/hate relationship with OPUS, which every year, twice a year, plays with our emotions and tugs on our heart strings. This is absolutely the only time we don’t love the words “shopping cart.” Here is your OPUS experience in a nutshell:
The week before:
If you’re pre-med or pre-business, your number one priority is your main pre-requisite that you want to get out of the way as soon as possible, with the best teacher in the mid-afternoon time slot so that you’ll always be awake and at your best for it.
Then, you select all your other classes based on scheduling around that pre-req. course that you NEED this semester in order to stay on track.
You spend lots of your time and energy researching teachers and asking older girls what the best class is to fill your GERs and you add them to your shopping cart.
You have your whole schedule worked out and you feel pretty satisfied and excited about next semester…until… you have to check your registration time. This randomly assigned registration time is crucial. That one time can seal your academic fate. You discover that your time is 8:00 PM and you start to panic, instantly mass-texting your friends to see what they got. Then you realize that you have one of the latest times you heard. The ideal schedule you’ve been planning could quickly disappear within a matter of 15 minutes!
What did you do to deserve this time?!
Even though you know in your heart that you won’t be getting the classes you want, for some reason you keep irrationally hoping that you will. Since you can’t depend on miracles, you make a few back-up plan classes that you’ll select if all your top choices fall through. You schedule out all the possibilities so that you have not only a Plan A and a Plan B, but Plans A-H. You’re now sure that there’s no way you’ll be stuck the day of registration.
The day of:
The dreaded day arrives, and you sit by your computer all day refreshing your OPUS page like it’s all that matters in life. You feel so impatient to know what’s going to happen and you just wish the whole day could fast forward to your registration time.
When the first registration time comes, you watch everyone around you in your building bug out. By the time they are done, all that is left is that class with the professor notorious for 20 page midterm papers and the 8:30 am class in the North Decatur building (questionably not on campus…). The only thing worse? When the your shopping cart is full with the blue squares and you realize every class you picked is full.
You become insane going back and forth from the course atlas to OPUS checking different classes and finally, you find something that you sort of like, sort of. It’s 7:59, you have your boxes checked off and you’re ready to go.
Finally, it’s 8 and you click enroll, and of course, your EmoryUnplugged gets disconnected. You’re stuck trying to fix it until 8:02 and all those sort-of okay classes are gone. In desperation, you ask around to find any class that’s open, just in hopes of remaining a full time student, at the very least. Now you’re enrolled in classes that you had no interest in, you’re not good at, and with the professor everyone told you to avoid.
….Don’t panic!
It’s not the end of the world–there’s always Add, Drop, Swap. You can watch the OPUS Swaps Facebook group blow up with posts for the next few days. (Note: Make sure to turn your notifications off before you start to get really annoyed!!) If that doesn’t work, professors are usually flexible with overloading students who have a legitimate reason to take their class!
Bottom line is, we all have a love/hate relationship with OPUS (okay- just hate), but hey–maybe that 8:30 class will pay off in the long run, you never know!