Class Registration: navigating the campus and nottingham.ac.uk

So I just finished course registration, which was an adventure. I even managed to completely screw it up (I'll get to that in a moment)

Back in the spring, there was a listing of courses for this semester. Come summer time, they totally changed that list, so many of the courses I'd looked at previously changed or became unavailable. Then, a few weeks ago, they finally put the timetables online so I could find out when the courses were held. Of course, all my new picks overlapped, and I had to change everything again. (Let me note that you have to coordinate information on two totally separate websites before you can begin to figure any of this out.)

I sorted it, though, and registered over the past two days. Registration does not happen online... you have to visit each department individually if you want to take a class their, during a specific time slot. Many of the time slots overlapped, though thankfully none of the ones I wanted had that problem. I showed up an hour early for each one, because several of the departments eventually had extremely long queues.

On Tuesday, for my film history course, I went to the American and Canadian studies department. The guy there was completely misinformed, but after about a half an hour of discussion we eventually got to sign up for class. Then I signed up for an art history course -- Italian Art in the age of Caravaggio and Bernini. On Wednesday, I showed up at the English department at 8am so I could be queued up for the 9am registration (I was fourth in a line of at least 50). I signed up for an Intro to Shakespeare course. Finally, I took the bus over to the Jubilee campus, and signed up for Internet and Web Services with the CS department.

After all that, I sat down and looked at what I had. Some courses offered multiple time slots for their seminars, so I navigated the website to pick which seminar I wanted. I made a discovery -- I essentially misread one of the numeric codes for my CS course. Instead of a lecture with my choice of one of two seminars, it was two lectures and a seminar (no choices). The second mandatory lecture overlapped with my film studies course. So I have to rearrange things

I don't really have that many other CS options; basically, I can switch to Artificial Intelligence Programming, or I can take no CS at all. I don't really care for that AI course, but I really can't afford to drop the film studies course, because it was pre-approved for transfer credit. Plus, if I switch to the AI CS course, I have to change my art history course as well

Everything is super complex and easy to misread... and I'm not even sure if there will be openings in the courses for me to switch into... I may just be screwed. I'm going to try and sort it out tomorrow (Friday) morning, which will be fun.

I really can't believe that course registration isn't online - even all the international exchange students from other countries say this is unusual. It's painful.