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.