Playing by the rules

My classmates are preparing for an insurrection against Harvard and I don’t blame them one bit.

Mid-Career Students vs HKS Administration

 

Harvard, in its intellectual wisdom, has made a simple process a royal pain in the ass.  Course selection and registration has become the bane of everyone’s existence, especially the mid-careers.  These are the rules for the registration “game”

1.      You can take up to 10 credits throughout the course of the one year program.

2.      You can take a maximum of 5 credits per semester.

3.      You must allocate 3 credits toward required classes.

4.      You can take almost any class offered at any of the Harvard Graduate Schools including the Business and Law school, as well as those offered by the MIT and Tufts’ graduate schools.

It would be if these were the only rules…it gets better:

5.      There are not enough seats in the required courses.

a.       You must keep your course selection secret so your classmates don’t register for the same one

b.      You can place a blind bid for a seat in the course (more about bidding later), but that is no guarantee you will get the course.

6.      If a required course is available it will present a time conflict with another course that you want to take.

7.      The other course you want to take will not be taught in the spring semester because:

a)      the instructor spends half the year at another prestigious university and is not available in the spring   

b)      the instructor will be going on sabbatical

c)      the fall course is a prerequisite for a spring course

8.      The Law School and the Business School hate the Kennedy School, so they operate on a completely different schedule and you must pledge your first born child and a kidney in order to cross register for their courses.

Once your schedule is figured out, and you have registered, the real fun begins!

You then have what are called shopping days.  Oh! How you wish you were shopping for shoes or designer handbags! But no, you’re shopping for classes.  After you’ve spent a week or so plotting your course schedule and getting course approvals, you are able to sit in a 30 minute introduction to your selected  course.

That’s when you find out that the course that sounded so awesome on paper is akin to watching paint dry on humid day. So everyone flocks to the more charismatic instructors and the classes become oversubscribed.  Then you must bid on the class.

Bidding in and of itself isn’t a bad thing.  The bad thing is that (wait for it…another list)

9.      You only have 1000 points to use across both semesters

10.  Some of the more popular  (and required) courses can use up 900 points each which means you’re possibly only getting into one of the course that require bidding

11.  Bidding doesn’t start until after the first day of classes.

a.       You are expected to have bought books, read literature and show up for a class you may not be in for the semester.

12.  If you don’t get into the class for which you bid, you have to scramble to round out your schedule with what’s left.

In my personal registration story, 3 of the 5 courses for which I registered are oversubscribed.  

One is a required course, another is cross listed with the law school and the last one will take a big chunk of my points in the bidding process.  Final course schedule TBD.

I think it’s time for another margarita.

I asked for a size "big"