Pre-Registration Guide

Hey there! Everyone seems to be having trouble with this, so I'm going to help walk you through it. If you haven't read and completed the post about a four year plan (its on the right, it's an old post) please do that first!

One of your fellow classmates and all-around-good-person, Tess, is allowing me to use her schedule that we've been working on to demonstrate how you go about this process. Her four year plan that we're working on is shown here:




To start, click on the Four Year Plan tab. This shows Tess' four year plan. Make sure you have yours in front of you, too. Now, click on the tab that says Blank Options. This tab shows a table for determining which classes you can take. We are going to fill this table. To do this, we first list the classes that we want to look for in the scheduler. In Tess' case, this was given in first semester, freshmen year (you can see that on the left of the four year plan tab). Tess then took her first class - Arabic - and listed it on the options sheet. She then went to myaccess (myaccess.georgetown.edu) and went student>schedule by campus to use the schedule of classes tool. She searched for Arabic (under the subject drop down menu) and found every instance of first level intensive Arabic that is being offered this semester. She then listed each of the details about this class on her table (see the 'All Available Choices' tab). She then continued like this until she had every option listed.

Once she had all the choices on the table, we went through and located reviews on the professors she had, and she began ranking her courses. To do this, we considered a few things:

• The ratings of the professors, and opinions from people who have taken the course
• How many offerings the course has, or sections. When planning a schedule, it's best to pick the class with the fewest options to schedule around, since it's easier to plan around those than it is to find somewhere that they fit
• The time of day and how it fit with other course offerings

Tess began with choosing her Arabic class, since that was fairly important to her. We highlighted the class that she wanted in the options tab, and then placed a visual representation on the schedule (see the 'Schedule' tab). She then continued on, looking through her options, placing and changing her courses.

A few things to keep in mind at this point:

• Remember that you can flex certain classes in your four year plan. Tess didn't see any humanities and writing courses that she liked the first time around, so she switched that course out with a theology course, and swapped them in the four year plan. Choose flexibly among your required courses.
• pay attention to ratemyprofessors.com as you do this. While the reviews there are not the end-all-be-all, they are incredibly useful when going into a course choice blind.
• Try to pay attention to what the overall structure of your class load is. You can see that Tess has Fridays almost entirely free. This can be very helpful. On the other hand, you'll see that there are sometimes patches of a couple hours between classes. Think about whether you want to have a regular lunch time or not, or what you can do with those time gaps. It's usually better to have large gaps of time to work with than small ones.

Once you've completed this schedule, it's time to choose second options. Tess and I are still working through this, but you can see where she's started that (it's the right hand portion of the 'All Choices' tab). Georgetown assigns requests considering your class status - so, as freshmen, you are really likely to not get all of the classes that you request. As a result, it's very important that you choose your secondary requests well. Here's a few guidelines for those of you attempting it:

• try to pick secondary courses that fit in between as many of your other first and second choices as possible. If you pick things that overlap, you increase your risk of losing more classes due to the deans selecting one course and throwing out those that overlapped.
• consider using other required courses to back your first choices. If they don't overlap, Tess could have scheduled a philosophy as a second choice to her theology, and then altered her plans if she got that instead of her primary choice.
• Do make use of all of your secondary choice slots. You really might not get what you requested (I personally got burned first semester, my schedule looked nothing like what I had requested).

The last thing you will want to do is to order your requests, and locate your course CRNs. When you put in a course request for pre-registration, the deans will start with your top choice (1) and end at your last choice (5). You'll want to think strategically, not by how much you like a course. If you think there will be a lot of demand for a particular class and you want a chance at getting it, you need to rank that first. After you are done ranking, use the scheduler again to take down the CRNs. These are course registration numbers. You'll find them in the scheduler in the heading of each course. For example, here's a particular problem of god:

The Problem of God - 21510 - THEO 001 - 19

The format is title - CRN - DEPT ### -## in which CRN stands for course registration number (I think); the DEPT is the department, the ### is the course number (by the way, this is a vague indicator of the difficulty of the course content - over 4-500 is graduate level; you can take under 500 without permission I believe), and the last two numbers are the section number. The CRN is specific to the course and the section, so when you go into pre-registration, you can simply enter the appropriate CRNs and you'll have inserted your specific course.

How to find all your coursebooks in the library (and skip the whole buying them thing)

Hello again! Please read this!!!

So I know you've been shown how to use library catalogs before. I know you think you know how to use them...And I know you're thinking the last thing you want to read is a long post about libraries. But this post will save you so much money. Seriously, loads of money. So read it. Your wallet/parents will thank you.

Also, you'll want to do this as soon as your schedule is set. Textbooks have a cyclical price season, with prices rising with demand in the fall and spring semesters. If you can purchase off-season, you'll get what you do need to buy cheaper.

STEP ONE: FIND YOUR REQUIRED BOOKS
Summary: There are two places to look, namely the bookstore website and your professor's syllabus.

PART ONE: BOOKSTORE
1. Go to your myaccess page (myaccess.georgetown.edu) using your netid and password. Click on student>student schedule (or if you have planned your schedule, but not registered, you can collect them by searching for each class in the main campus course schedule). Collect the class codes for each of your classes (they should be in the format of four letters and then two or three numbers, ex. RUSS001 or  GOVT343). Do not close your window(s) -- you'll use those in part two.

It should look something like this - you'll see the code here is GOVT006, section 18

2. Go to the bookstore website and then click the books link drop-down to text books (shortcut). Navigate the drop-down menus for each class, and at the end you will find what your professor has currently requested that the bookstore have in-stock for you to purchase. Note that this means (a) the professor might try to add things on later, or that (b) the professor may have more reading planned for you that you don't have to purchase through the school store. So if your class result is blank, keep checking later in the summer.
3. List these books by class with as much information as is given (including edition).

PART TWO: SYLLABI
1. From the windows you opened in part one, click on the course title (if needed) and then the link for 'view course description'.

You should end up on a page like this.

2. Select your professor, if there is more than one available for the course you are registering for. You'll end up on a page about that professor. One of the options on their page will by for their syllabi. Click there, then enter your netid to login and access the syllabi that are on record.

3. Once you reach this page, you can download any that are on record. If they have one up for the course you are planning to take, then you've already got a complete listing of everything they expect for the course. If they don't, but they have one from perhaps a semester ago for the same course, then you can guess. It's sometimes a nice way to start on your required reading before you actually start the class (though of course you run the risk of having something removed from the syllabus, but extra reading certainly wont hurt you, at least during the summer).

Now, make a complete document listing all of the books you need for each class. The beginning of mine looks like this:

For the next step, we're going to see which of these books we can obtain through the library system.

STEP TWO: SEARCHING THE LIBRARY
Go to library.georgetown.edu. The catalog is in the right-hand corner. I'm going to warn you that this search function is particularly sensitive, so try to use just enough information to get your hit, not so much that you'll accidentally miss your item. I'm going to walk you through a complicated search to show you how it can be used.

Now, at any point, these are your possible means of getting a book:
Lauinger
other on-campus library
consortium
WRLC
buy it

This search process will demonstrate how you can rule-in and rule-out these possible options.

Let's say you need to find this book:

James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose (Brookings, 2003)

First, go to the catalog and search GU only for, say, the title. You'll get a lot of results, since these are pretty general keywords. Switch to title, however, and you'll only find four or five. The publishing date will direct you to the correct entry.

See, right there - bottom entry, highlighted.

Clicking it, however, gives you the following information:

Well, the hell does that mean? The three locations listed are Lauinger library (the general campus library), the library at the Georgetown campus in Qatar (which is as helpful to you as if you the book was, well, in another country...) and the CERES library. CERES is one of the graduate programs at Georetown, and as far as I know, CERES books are at least available to you. But I don't really know all the details, though, and so I would prefer to find the book elsewhere (but if I can't, I now know I have at least one avenue to pursue). The Lau book is missing, and that makes life kind of complicated.

At this point, your options are:
Lauinger

other on-campus library

consortium
WRLC
buy it
To check and see if you can find the book in the consortium, head back to the library homepage (library.georgetown.edu) and re-search for the title with the GU & Consortium option selected. This will take you into a different search.

 
You will see that the last result is the title we need. Clicking that will give you a list of locations inside the consortium in which your book can be found.

 Now, you might notice that this page contains results for GU, and therefore be tempted to stop searching using the GU only option. I'll warn you against this option, because I think sometimes the consortium data isn't as good as the GU only data (perhaps it is updated less regularly). But in this case, we see the same results as before, and then more. If you would like, you can click the "request" key to request a book from one of the other libraries. The book will be brought to lau (usually very quickly) and they will email you when you can pick it up.

At this point, your options are:
Lauinger

other on-campus library

consortium

WRLC
buy it

We're now down to using WRLC. In this case, we don't need to - there is a library on campus with the book, and a library in the consortium that can be borrowed from. If we hadn't found the result here, we could search for it in WRLC. That option will show you every library in the area to see if any of them have it. But since at this point most students will probably just buy the book (rather than try to get to wherever that library is, usually not metro accessible, if they even have the book at all), I'm not going to cover it. It is, however, an option worth exploring if your book is pretty expensive.

Now, you should update your sheet. I highlight mine to show where I can get the book, and where I have requested it. In the end, mine looks like this:

You can see that the majority of my books are available in some library, somewhere (only the yellow ones were not). By requesting them ahead of time you can seriously cut down on your overall costs.

You can also mark - as I have - the floor that your books are on. The chart for the library uses the call numbers and is as follows:

A–DJK     First Floor

DK–N      Fourth Floor

NA–PH    Fifth Floor

PJ–PLZ    Lower Level

PM–PZ    Fifth Floor

Q–Z         Lower Level

Confusing, I know. But it helps, because you can just rearrange your results by floor and march right into lay to pick out everything you need at once.

Okay, last important thing: what do you do if you can't find something, but you seriously think the library should have it? Why, you ask for help.

I was searching for a number of Russian stories for one of my courses, but I couldn't find them in either GU or the consortium. However, I was suspicious that either I was transliterating names wrong (GU uses the library of congress system, by the way), or that the stories might be included in anthologies, which Georgetown doesn't index. So I asked for help. The Georgetown library has online IM support for searching - which is basically the most useful thing about the library website. To access it, go here (library home page > ask us > chat option). The librarians will help you with anything you need. In my case, at least two of the stories were included in anthologies, and the Russian bibliographer was able to help me find them.

Four Year Plan

Hoya Saxa! Welcome to Georgetown!

This is an overdue post. Georgetown does not explain very well to freshmen how to design a four year plan. They will probably send you a small packet late in the summer explaining to you how to register for your courses, and giving you a selection of a fairly small number of options. I don’t think it’s very helpful. So this post will be about fixing that.

First, though, a caveat: I am not a professional at this, and I have no means of guaranteeing this entire post is accurate. Make sure that any four year plan you draft is verified by your dean when you arrive here. This is absolutely crucial. I would not like to hear that some freshman followed my advice, didn't verify, and then arrived at senior year having missed some obscure requirement. So please, people, use this as a rough guide only!

//How-to

Step One: Browse through your school’s bulletin (found at http://bulletin.georgetown.edu/, you’ll need to scroll down the page a little). I am a student in the college (rather than MSB, NHS, or SFS), so that’s what I’m familiar with, and what I will walk you through. The process should be similar for the other schools. Here’s a link to the college’s bulletin: http://bulletin.georgetown.edu/collegegen.html (note the bulletin may change between years; if you are reading this later, you might want to locate the most recent version when it gets posted).

Step Two: After a while, select the academic program that you think you will follow. This can include up to three “elements” (that is, one major and two minors/certificates, two majors and one minor/certificate). It’s fine if you change your mind later; you just need to pick stuff to start with. I recommend selecting the *highest* number of things you might want to do, so that you plan for a “worst case” class usage scenario (so if you know you want to be a government major, and you think you might want to be a Russian minor, and you might be considering a certificate – my academic program – it would be best to plan in all three, rather than just the major). While you are doing this, it’s important that you note a few things:

• Consider what kind of social life you expect to have on campus. Consider clubs you might join, potential leadership positions, things like that. Think about how much time you would like to have free.
• Consider that college work is much harder than high school work. I am not deceiving you. College professors are not reasonable human beings.
• Consider the relative difficulty of different kinds of classes. Intensive language courses will take over your soul (fellow agnostics and atheists, you are not exempt). I know you cannot conceive of the amount of time they will take over, not having experienced it previously, but please just trust me on this. The same is true of many pre-med hard science classes (it is my understanding that orgo will be the hardest experience of your young life; you have been warned).
• Consider whether or not you want to take on an internship. If you do, realize that even 20 hours per week with 20 hours of class is the equivalent of a full-time job. You will not have much of a life outside of this, and you will not have a lot of time to study. Grades might then suffer.
  
• Consider the purpose of your majors and minors. This can be important for future career paths.
• Consider how different majors and minors will shape your career path more generally. What will help you get a job later? Will your language skill be better supported by a regional certificate program or minor? Would your linguistics major work well with a computer science minor or double major, that would let you do computational linguistics? Is your interest in chemistry enough to encourage pursuing a major that will never be useful to you in your eventual goal of teaching high school English? Choose carefully which battles to fight and try to justify the arrangement of your majors and minors, rather than each individually.

Step Three: Collect the requirements from the bulletin. Be careful and thorough. Sometimes something like a “tutorial” or “colloquium” will be mentioned, but classes won’t appear in the schedule or in the rest of the bulletin. Those are still usually relevant. Read carefully and build your list thoroughly. Also consider whether or not your program offers an honors version that you want to apply for. Check what class requirements result from succeeding at this. Check for lab requirements for science classes, for hierarchical class requirements (for example, the cognitive science minor requires a number of classes dispersed by subject over the 100 level, but most of these classes also have pre-requisites – meaning that the cognitive science minor actually requires almost twice the number of classes it appears to!). Build a list of these requirements in excel or google spreadsheet, and place them in sequential order. Also record the number of credits each class requires as best you can (you can do this perfectly once you get access to the scheduler; for now treat anything not labeled as three credits, except intensive languages (6) and the hard sciences (which will take quite a few because of lab requirements…if you have a hard science track you want to schedule, contact me and I’ll try to put you in touch with a fellow science person to work it out).

Step Four: Assess your general education requirements. The language requirement varies by language (you must complete “intermediate level” in the college, which will be one year from some language, two for others; the SFS has a proficiency exam, etc.). Most require two years, but it varies. You’ll need to check the bulletin. Record credits for these courses as well. For the college, the other requirements are as follows:

• Humanities and Writing - 2 courses
• History - 2 courses (from specific listings)
• Philosophy - 2 courses (usually problem of god or bib lit + one more)
• Theology - 2 courses (intro to ethics or intro to philosophy + one upper level or the other intro)
• Math/Science - 2 courses (exceptions, see the bulletin)
• Social Science - 2 courses
• Intermediate Language – as required

You’ll want to read through the bulletin at least once so that you understand the specific requirements for each of these, but I can’t do all of the legwork for you. :P It’s all there.

Step Five: Use a spreadsheet to draw the maximum number of courses you can take per semester. I've done the tough stuff and made you an interactive online spreadsheet. If you like it, buy me a coffee when you get to campus. ;)

The first sheet (see at the bottom, where it reads blank, demo, etc?) is for you. You can play around on that while we discuss. Nothing will be saved, though, so don't reload the page and expect it to stay. You'll have to copy it to your own doc (or download mine, see below) to save it.

//Demo walk-through

//caveat: this schedule is deceptively simple and empty. Please do not make the mistake of taking non-required electives during your first year. You can FB or comment here to ask why that is, but otherwise just trust me. As you debate different majors and minors and find new class opportunities, you will fill most of the holes in your schedule. Take 15-20 credits your first year, as many as you feel comfortable with, and don't take non-req'ed classes.

You will see from demo sheet one that we are designing a schedule for a government major with a computer science minor and a Russian minor. I chose these since I pursued each at some point, so I'm a bit more familiar with the requirements.

At Demo 1 I have listed on the right all of the required classes, abbreviated, from the bulletin. This is the first step.

In Demo 2, I have begun placement. Note that I am starting with things which are sequential first. Geneds and most of the government major are not timing dependent (CPS is not required for IR, etc.) whereas Russian is (Russian 2 requires both semesters of Russian 1, etc.). Therefore I place this in first. In ranking sequential items, I selected Russian over the CS minor because I think starting languages earlier is better, but that's preferential.

In Demo 3, you will see that I have continued, placing the next sequential item, the CS minor.

In Demo 4, I demonstrate some problems to avoid. All of the other courses have been placed, but there are two issues. First, the duel requirement I noted above is in violations, and two, there are two few courses.

Demo 5 demonstrates a filled and complete schedule that isn't violating any of the rules (unless I fucked up, in which case I apologize; let me know and I will fix it!).

And that's all there is to it! The four year plan sets you up for planning your schedule (something to be covered in a later post). If you have questions from the process or want me to double check your plan, feel free to add me on FB and message me to let me know. My name is April Eubank. You can also email me at ale35 at georgetown dot edu.