Fall 2021 registration is in full swing for the undergraduate body as rising seniors, rising juniors, and rising sophomores register for coursework. Unlike previous semesters, Stevens has implemented a shift from the older myStevens platform to “Workday Student” for all registration, academic, and work study related actions. On Monday, rising seniors and priority registration students signed up for course work. On Thursday, rising juniors signed up for classes. Other than priority registration status freshmen and sophomores, all remaining students will be registering for courses next Tuesday on April 20. A standard from the previous system, registration opens at 7 a.m. for selected cohorts.
All students are familiar with course registration via the myStevens web portal — The Stute reached out to students to see how the new platform panned out. Many students came to a consensus that the Workday system was less stressful and streamlined their registration concerns.
Asim Qureshi, 3/4 Mechanical Engineering major, said that the new registration portal was a “welcome change.” Qureshi found that constant website crashes, having to compile an Excel sheet of all course call numbers, and dealing with separate schedulers was a stressful situation when registering with the old portal. However, with the Workday system in place, Qureshi found that “all you have to do is hit ‘Register’ to get everything in, and you can register separately or from another saved schedule for the classes that did not go through the first time.” Students can now register all courses by pre-saving a schedule of courses beforehand and registering for them with one click.
Keenan Yates, 1/4 Engineering Management major, who was able to register alongside rising seniors like Qureshi because she is on the Stevens swim team, is also glad for this new system. Yates found that, while registration was less stressful, the aspect of scheduling courses beforehand was frustrating. She mentioned that, being new to the system, she would accidentally delete her schedule and she “had a hard time figuring out what [the schedule] looked like without being able to see the actual laid out schedule (like with SIT Scheduler).”
While there were many positives about the new registration system, there are several suggestions that students offered. One concern brought up by 2/4 Business and Technology major Anjali Pydishetty was about making it easier to find what classes were available for the coming semester. She mentioned spending quite a lot of time browsing courses to find whether they were offered in the fall or spring. Likewise, Yates also found that it would be more beneficial in the future if the Workday platform “could input external time conflicts so that the system would automatically tell you if a class picked overlapped with set practice or work hours.” Currently, students can only view errors only after the course was added to their schedule, such as if the course has a prerequisite or is not available for the major.
Other concerns seemed to lie in registration course requests. Grace Miguel, 3/4 Software Engineering major, is part of the Accelerated Masters Program and found the course requests by application wait time to be discouraging. She currently has only been able to enroll in four courses, where only one course (a 600 level graduate course) has been approved. She was “displeased and concerned” at the response by the Office of Undergraduate Academics to have her check back in May for the status of her graduate course requests. Miguel mentions that not knowing what courses she can enroll in for the fall semester until May can impact “how many classes [she] can double count and the cost of [her Spring 2022] semester.”
These comments emphasize the streamlined registration experiences, and students hope that some concerns with user interface and course requests will be resolved in the near future. These students mentioned that if there were more detailed and visual schedulers available onsite like SIT Scheduler, the experience would be more pleasant. Overall, registration via Workday seems to be off to a good start for the Stevens community.
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