Finding classes and connecting with faculty

An alarm goes off, and you grope in the darkness for your laptop. Your registration window has arrived. Early today, the senior class woke up to register for classes. Although that mouse-clicking 7 a.m. race to success takes only a few minutes, it is the conclusion of the exhilarating part of the year that is bookbagging. Classes are a fundamental raison d’etre in college, and the bookbagging that precedes enrollment is the most important part of registration.

It should not come as much of a surprise that students love bookbagging so much. The period typically overlaps with at least one round of midterms, and in the fully ramped-up stress of the semester, we need little incentive to enjoy the faux productivity of browsing classes. Distraction aside, many of us enjoy savoring the possibilities, from house courses to three-day weekends. Frustrations with current classes are drowned out by visions of imagined possibilities—a new class taught by a new professor over something far more exciting than current classes.

Considering how fondly students regard bookbagging and word-of-mouth class swapping with friends, it surprises us that the University has not managed to sustain any kind of event in this time of year. Whether in the form of a midnight bookbagging event in Perkins or departments organizing an evening of hor d’oeuvres with professors and students, any number of events stand to take advantage of the occasion presented by registration. We push every semester for more academic traditions to provide an opportunity for the University to informally connect students to professors, Directors of Undergraduate Studies and other students with shared interests. A simple suggestion for departments would be to create promotional videos, in the style of signature classes, for courses, or professors more generally, to supplement the plain and sometimes incomplete information on ACES.

On the more technical side, ACES’s interface is in dire need of improvement. Aside from the website’s aged look, ACES could be significantly improved in how it supplies course evaluation information to students. Currently, students have aggregated five-point ratings for past semesters of a class, but we believe this system lacks the testimonial advantages of RateMyProfessor, a popular website for reviewing professors. Extended feedback is already collected as part of routine course evaluations each semester, and we see little reason to not include the more helpful remarks to the benefit of students. ACES is the primary way students interact with our large catalog of courses, and we further ask that departments provide some kind of oversight for how complete course entries are. It is all too common to find classes lacking in synopses or with the bare minimum of information. If professors have syllabi prepared for classes, it would also be sensible to allow them to attach them to ACES for students to see the full range of topics covered by a class.

Turning to our esteemed faculty, students can easily find CVs and research interests by navigating department pages, but the relationships students could have with professors they are not otherwise in contact with could be greatly facilitated with institutional support. Beyond the meet-and-greets suggested, self-introductory videos or short personal statements by professors on their pages could give students greater reason to look for classes taught by a professor or to reach out for a FLUNCH.

Bookbagging excites us largely because it reminds us of the sheer opportunity for knowledge gained in college. Improving ACES, updating faculty webpages and jumpstarting academic traditions across the board moves students closer to the curricular sources of knowledge that the university experience is founded on.