Be Advised: Part 3

I have SOARed.

Or, more accurately, I have taken the Student Orientation, Advising and Registration test, and received my Personal Identification Number so that I could register for my classes.

But as with everything involved with this “schooling thing”, all did not go as planned.

As I posted in Part 2, Class Registration opened at 0600 on the 12th, but that the earliest time for first time students to go through the SOAR program was the 17th. I called the school, put on my best whine, and was able to get into the online course that opened on the 12th at 0800.

So at the appropriate time, I logged in with my school email addy as my login and my student ID as my password and got….nothing. I waited five minutes and tried again (in case they hadn’t turned it on yet), getting the same result. Another five and the same. I called the school only to find that enough people had also put on their best whine and gotten into the online course to crash it.

But not to worry, the IT folks would be on top of it when they got in at 0900 and to try to log on again at noon. I went to bed, woke up at 1300 and tried again. Nothing. Another phone call was made and I was told to try tomorrow at 0800. I then went back to bed for the day.

Meanwhile, returning students were already registering for classes.

Not being one to listen to the reasonable request for patience of others, I tried to log in at 1900 before going to work….. and got in.

I quickly wandered around this very weird corner of the school’s site, with multitudes of frames instead of pages (reminding me of the blogosphere circa 2003), and felt like I was walking through a digital version of the school handbook that I’d picked up during my visit to the campus, and had read cover to cover in order to get this far. Except that there were multiple links to a test I had to pass to get my PIN.

I was worried that it was going to be some quasi-ordeal with 20 to 30 questions. After all, the in-person version of the SOAR takes a full two hours. But I was feeling confident and clicked through and took the test.

It was six questions that I could have answered while half asleep. I was shown a pop-up that congratulated me for passing and telling me that my PIN would be emailed to my school email within 48 hours.

Meanwhile, returning students were already registering for classes.

Despite my wish to do so, I do not think it proper to complain that it only took 18 hours for the PIN to be dropped in my email in box. I need all the karma I can get.

With PIN in hand, so to speak, I logged in to the Class Registration portion of the main site. I needed one English Comp class and one remedial Algebra class.

Double denied.

There may have been thirty-two different English Comp classes available at 0600 on the 12th, nine of them being held some time between 0700 and 1200 (when I could attend), but they were all full by 1100 on Friday. Including and especially the online courses I was hoping to take.

I was able to get into a 1900-2130 two-day a week class, but a call to my boss verified that she wasn’t willing to modify my work schedule.

The same problem arose for my remedial math class. Three classes available. Three classes full. I was fuming (including, but not limited to much mumbled fowl language). I was left to flip through the Winter Quarter Schedule book to see which of my other prerequisites I might be able to get into this first quarter.

I snagged one of the last places in Geography 100 (aka: Intro to Geography). This made me quite happy and caused the mumblings to subside long enough for me to turn to the wrong page in the Mathematics section, where I found the “Resource Modules”.

The RM’s offer the opportunity to do a quick Pass/Fail run through a subject and then retake the entrance exam. If you score higher on the exam, you don’t have to go through the course. Like a scholastic double or nothing.

I’m not much of a gambler, but I thought I’d better try to get some sort of mathematics subject in this quarter. I turned yet another page to try and find my particular RM and was surprised when I found more mathematics courses stuffed up in the page corner by “Music, The Fundamentals of,”.

The were “Flex Courses” classified as Lab Courses which are taught on a PC instead of out of a book. From the handbook, “These courses will be taught in an independent computer-mediated learning mode. Attendance the first week of class is mandatory and also required for submitting homework and testing.”

I ran the course number through the system for the time I wanted and found Epic Win!!!

And although I’m only batting .500, I’m in like Flynn, baybay.

Except that I still needed to pay for the courses and get the books, which involves my second visit to the campus.

But that is in Part 4 of this tale, which will hopefully happen tomorrow.