GUEST ROOM | Pre-Enrollment Pandemonium

Because the semester involves a detailed, springtime means many various issues for a Cornellian; magnolia blossoms, the primary heat day on the slope, college students lounging on the quad for the primary time since fall, and so forth. Sadly, spring additionally brings about some of the anxiety-filled mornings of all the time period: pre-enrollment for the next semester. By way of anxiousness, this yr’s pre-enrollment has been no totally different.

There are seemingly limitless hurdles that the common Cornell scholar should bounce over to even start constructing a schedule on the morning of pre-enrollment, and in my circle alone it looks like I’ve heard all of it: capped waitlists, surprising prerequisite errors, entry codes that had been promised however by no means delivered. God solely is aware of what different limitations to entry Cornell has let free upon its scholar physique. When Ezra stated “Any Particular person, Any Research,” he ignored the half that claims, “till the category is deemed full.”

What’s extra? This course of is meant to get simpler as time goes on, but it surely simply doesn’t. If the ever-feared row of purple Xs in Scholar Heart served as a right-of-passage into the Cornell tutorial neighborhood that college students solely needed to navigate round previous the autumn of their freshman yr, possibly this difficulty wouldn’t be such an enormous deal. However that isn’t the case. I’m writing as an incoming junior who, throughout my fifth pre-enrollment session at Cornell, was accepted into one class. One out of seven.