The scheduling process is extremely frustrating and needs to be changed. From course planning with advisors to the MyPack Portal system; scheduling is stressful and annoying on every level.

First of all, it really bothers me that you can only open one window of MyPack Portal at a time. When creating a wish list, you often have to switch between the wish list, your degree audit and grade distributions. I cannot tell you the number of times I received a request from MyPack to go back to the most recently active page when trying to have all three of these things open at once. Any other website in the world would allow multiple pages to be open and active at once. Even after MyPack was reformatted, only one page could be viewed at a time. This makes scheduling long and tedious.  On top of all our work, it takes up too much time.

Furthermore, advising is a pain. My advisor posts times on the door of his office and I have to walk to Tompkins to sign up. Maybe I’m a lazy bum, but I think I should be able to sign up by e-mail. Tompkins is a 15 to 20 minute walk from my dorm. While that may not seem like much, I have to walk there and back, making the whole ordeal of simply signing up for an advising time about 45 minutes.

Advisors do not always advise well. As I began to create a wish list for the upcoming semester, my advisor sent me an e-mail recommending that I take the class ECI 205. It is a three credit class. However, when I went to add it to my wish list, I found that the class did not exist. During my advising appointment, my advisor then told me to take ECI 204 instead, because of a change they were making in the College of Education. I returned to my dorm and added the class to my schedule only to find out it was a one credit class as opposed to a three credit class.

Thinking that the amount of credits may have been a mistake, I e-mailed my advisor. He told me that I had to take ED 204, a two credit class, along with it. These two classes would equate to the three credits that the ECI 205 class fulfilled. If my advisor had known this all along, why would he have sent an e-mail before my appointment telling me to sign up for the ECI 205 course? And why wouldn’t he have told me to take ECI 204 instead without any mention of ED 204?

The times given to sign up for classes are extremely inconvenient. I have yet to be given a time to sign up for classes that does not occur during my current class times. As many N.C. State students know, if you do not sign up at your assigned time, other students in your major could fill up the classes you need before you get there. Some teachers do not allow computers in class, forcing students to choose between class attendance and a good schedule.

There are ways in which N.C. State could go about making the scheduling system less of a hassle for students. The MyPack Portal website administrators should work to give the site the ability to be opened in multiple windows which would make scheduling more efficient.

Next, instead of having students waste time while signing up for an advising appointment, advisors should send out an e-mail with the times available for advising. They should create a GoogleDoc where their advisees can sign up for a time slot. This would be much more convenient and effective not only for students, but for the advisors themselves.

The confusion with class changes needs to be better organized. Either the Degree Audits need to be fixed to reflect any changes in classes for students’ degrees or the advisors need to be informed enough to tell students up front if a class has been changed. This process would make an easier, stress-free system for already overly-stressed students.