If you were enrolled for classes these past summer sessions, walking through campus you most likely had high expectations for fall 2010 like I did.
The construction zones throughout campus, the bus stops getting reconstructed, the cafeteria like set-up outside the library, no more furloughs and the completion of the recreation center were all reasons for high expectations. One can’t deny that our campus is looking a little spiffier.
However, going into my third year on campus, I’ve learned that the quote “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” is very applicable to Cal State Long Beach.
With high expectations and a few days before the new school year, waitlisted students received an e-mail from enrollment services that broke their hearts.
It announced that there were going to be no waitlists this year. Thus, everyone on any waitlisted class had to be dropped. Many, myself included, accepted the bad news. I for one knew that you can’t always win.
There were many students who panicked and quickly signed up for whatever open classes were left to add, even if they didn’t needed those classes. To my amazement, however, on the first day of classes, students were still trying to add.
That’s when it hit me. There are two types of students on campus.
Ones that read emails from Brotman Hall and naively accept what they say and others that read those same emails and smell the bullshit.
For those of us who are naïve, this story only gets worse.
I watched as those crashers, as I like to call them, stole the seats of innocent waitlisters.
I only went to the classes I was enrolled in the first day of school, so I decided to try using MyCSULB. The same site that days ago broke the hearts of multiple students with its deathly blue block icon that reminded you the class you longed for all summer was closed, was now filled with green circles that screamed open classes.
These open classes typically had one more seat up for grabs, but were viewable by all 33,000 students. Even worse, for a lot of those classes instructor’s consent was needed, as well.
By the time you had dropped one class, tried to add another class and e-mailed the new instructor for consent, you found out that you couldn’t add the class because not only did you not come to class the first day but also there were three other students who wanted that same spot.
I faced a similar situation. I did not get the class MyCSULB showed was open and I also lost a former class because I decided to drop class instead of swapping the classes.
In this case what was once a 12-unit schedule was now 9. For anyone with a federal loan, you would now owe the school money because you were no the longer the full-time student.
This all happened because of an e-mail that specifying that for this semester there would be no waitlists. If I only I smelt the bullshit before I acted so drastically.
Thank you CSULB for once again feeding on the naivety and ignorance of students that read your automated messages and don’t smell the bullshit.
Welcome week? Pssh, more like hell week.
Uzo Umeh is a junior communications major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er
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