The end of the school year is fast-approaching. The weather is getting nicer, your summer plans are (hopefully) coming together — this should be an exciting time.

But this time of year means many other things. It means cramming for that last round of midterms and then finals. It means making sure to spend as much time as you can with the people who have been by your side for the last eight months. And then on top of that, if you’re not a senior, it means signing up for fall classes.

For me, the stress of registering for classes is the most difficult task. Class registration should be done with focus and intent, but I find that very hard to do. The stress has gotten to me so much that this weekend, I found myself willingly folding and putting away a month’s worth of laundry just to avoid the task of sitting down to my computer and figuring out which classes I would register for.

Our top priority while living on this campus is to get an education, although this can be easy to forget with all the time spent in clubs and meetings and with friends.

The number of classes offered here is astounding, and can seem overwhelming. College advisors often provide students with example schedules to ensure graduation requirements are met, but the process is more complicated than that.

I’ve done my research. I know where I want to be in the long term. But the process of getting there is not clear-cut, and every person has his or her own needs.

For people that don’t have as many long-term plans as I do, I can only imagine this whole process being even more stressful. With the amount we are paying for school, we want the classes we take to be worthwhile for our careers. But at the same time, we want our classes to be useful in other ways: whether subjects we would never have an opportunity to explore outside of these four years, or maybe some easy classes to boost our GPAs after a rough semester.

Sometimes, you do have a plan. Yet when you go to register for classes, you aren’t allowed in because of some stipulation about what year you are or which college you are in. Sometimes, the problems amount to something as simple as a computer glitch or the unfortunate situation of being shut out of a class while other students save seats for their friends.

With all these complications, many students resort to plugging classes into an automated online algorithm like Scheedule. This website knows which classes and sections are offered by each school and spits out pages of potential schedules with different timing options. Then, we pick the one that lets us sleep in, or be done early, or leave time to eat or go to the gym, and then write down the CRN codes and hope for the best.

These online scheduling tools have been a lifesaver for me. I’m much happier to have a machine just tell me what to do and go with that. Other stressed out students could benefit from a computer doing the hard work for them as well.

For now, this is over and my schedule is set. Until of course the day before classes start up again when I revisit my schedule and decide to change my life yet again.

Hayley is a freshman in ACES.

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