Are you really a student at Trent University if you don’t have a story about course registration?

Everyone I know has, at some point or another, woken up at the ass-crack of dawn to wrestle with a course registration system as cumbersome and obtuse as it is prone to inexplicable failure.

Just as braving the horror show that is Trent’s Undergraduate priority registration has historically been a right of passage—hence why you’re rewarded with an earlier time slot the more times you’ve been subjected to it—the system working as advertised seems the exception as opposed to the rule.

I remember, in my first couple years at Trent, the misery of cross-referencing the Undergraduate Calendar with the long and imparsable list of course codes provided in a drop-down by the now-obsolete Visual Schedule Builder, copy-pasting the string of characters it would provide into the world’s jankiest HTML box separated by commas only for the entire thing to shit the bed at the last possible minute.

Much though we hated VBS then, as the philosopher Passenger once said in his treatise “Let Her Go,” “You only know your lover when you let her go. And you let her go.” (VBS is the lover in this metaphor, in case you were wondering).

And let her go we did, when last year Trent University switched from the archaic, opaque, and prone to self-destruction VSB to the shinier-but-no-less-fundamentally-frustrating Self-Service system that they currently use.

Last year I wrote a story about that switch in which students revealed that they pretty much universally hated it, and in which College Office Staff revealed that the course registration service had crashed, despite the onus for switching to it being at least partially to prevent exactly that.

It was—to borrow a turn of phrase from our now-departed President—a bit of a shitshow.

You’ll be glad to know that, in the grand tradition of Trent University, little has meaningfully changed this year. 

I woke up this morning ready to register for Fall 2024 Graduate classes. At 8:00 I was sitting on my couch in a pair of booty shorts and a Calvin Klein bralette, drinking lukewarm coffee and staring at the course selections I had made sure to plug into the program well in advance, as the email I’d received from Graduate Studies had advised me.

Registration opened at 10:00 AM. 

At 9:56 AM I closed all the tabs on my computer (something which, to me, is worse than having teeth pulled), and restarted my laptop to have a clean browser instance (self-service is notoriously picky). I disabled all my privacy protection peripherals, turned on third-party cookies, let Trent install whatever bloatware it needed to get me through this yearly undertaking of singular, torturous importance.

At 10:01 AM I reloaded the Self-Service site and waited for the little blue “Register” button to appear.

It didn’t.

I checked the email I’d received the week before detailing the seven extremely convoluted steps by which one had to register for classes.

Trent makes its graduate students register for a “Placeholder” class prior to registering for actual classes. Why they do that, I’m not exactly sure. Is it baffling? Yes, though I was prepared not to question it so long as it worked.

Did it work? Well, no. 

I refreshed the page. 

Much to my chagrin, the “Register” button did not magically appear. I sighed for the benefit of no one in particular, least of all me. I texted my co-workers that I’d be coming to the office late.

Over the next thirty minutes I did everything of which I could think to coax the Self-Service program into some semblance of functionality. I removed everything from my timetable and manually re-addded it. I tried a different brower. I logged out and back in again. I tried to log into MyTrent in “Incognito” mode.

At 10:30 I gave up and called the Graduate Studies office. The (very kind) person whom I spoke to kindly asked whether my browser had already been open before I attempted to register.

I explained that I had deliberately, in cold blood, murdered about a month’s worth of accumulated tabs for fear that my thoroughly stale browsing data might sully the delicate Self-Service program.

My helper asked me if I could log out and try again. After that proved fruitless, they walked me through using both a different browser and an incognito tab to try and remedy the issue. Each time they asked me to try something else, there was a lengthy pause while I waited for Microsoft to issue me another Two-Factor Authentication code. 

By the end of the morning I’d received twenty-odd texts telling me to “Use verification code 690420 for Microsoft Authentication.”

Having exhausted all of the methods by which I’d already tried to remedy my registration issues, the Graduate Studies rep on the other side of the line helpfully informed me that I should email Graduate Records [at] Trent U [dot] [ca] with a screenshot of my broken registration page, so that they might take a stab at it.

As I opened Snip & Sketch I ruefully wondered to myself what taking a screenshot of a “Register” button that so clearly wasn’t there would accomplish.

Doing my best to put my cynicism aside, I hammered out an email to graduate records detailing my issues as best I could. 

To their credit, within ten minutes I received a reply. I felt a momentary sense of elation. Maybe this had all been resolved.

I opened the email, and was confronted with the following:

At that moment, I loudly vocalized my frustration in a manner I’ll not here reproduce out of respect for my readers’ more delicate sensibilities.

I stood up and paced the length of my apartment. I drank the rest of my bitter, congealed coffee in one gulp. I liquefied several cups of frozen fruit in my blender to take the edge off my nerves.

Having calmed down, I informed the (again, admittedly kindly) Graduate Studies secretary that yes, I had in fact done all of those things—multiple times—to little avail.

I stared at my Outlook interface for several minutes. No reply instantly materialized. I closed the inbox and refreshed my personal email. A FedEx notification informed me that the physical copy of Baldur’s Gate 3 I’d ordered four months ago had finally shipped. I closed my email and informed my colleagues that I was on my way to the office.

I tried not to let the morning’s tribulations weigh on my conscience. I felt the way I feel every time I redownload Bloodborne and throw myself at the next boss for another ten hours only to die too many times for me to consider it “fun” and inevitably uninstall the game again.

Is mashing the “Reload” key on a website which seems stalwart in its refusal to function the Dark Souls of course registration? Nay, says I, because at least FromSoftware games give you a parry button. At least the designers of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition telegraphed their intentions to make you miserable, as opposed to offering platitudes about how sorry they are that you’re having such a hard time navigating their website and won’t you maybe just consider logging out and logging back in again one more time?

The real thing that added insult to injury, however, was the email I received a little after I got to work.

I realize, of course, this is not the people at Graduate Studies’ fault. The people patiently walking me through redundant troubleshooting methods over the phone didn’t ask to be saddled with this system that clearly is not up to snuff.

It’s not the fault of anyone who I’m actually speaking to that this is happening. It’s Trent’s fault, they’re simply the ones left to pick up the pieces. 

I mean, Trent knew that this was the day when all the graduate students would be attempting to register for classes. How in the actual fuck could they not be prepared for that volume?

When you tell a bunch of students “Hey, registration opens at 10:00 AM—you better be quick about it!” it should not come as any sort of surprise when students try to register at 10:00 AM.

When I asked someone I spoke to at Graduate Studies over the phone, they confirmed to me that multiple people were experiencing the same problems as I was. Sure, maybe this is more or less par for the course during every registration period, but does it not stand to reason that something about this clearly isn’t working?

The expression ain’t “if it’s broke, don’t fix it,” after all. I struggle to understand how this is an acceptable way to treat students, especially considering the amount of stress they’re likely under when it comes to ensuring they’ll actually be able to attend the school at which they’ve committed to study.

You only get one chance at a first impression, after all, and for many of the students in my position who’ve not spent four years at Trent already, this is certainly a sour way to start their time here.

Of course I have the privilege of being able to voice my complaints here, and given I know that people at Trent Communications read what I write my hope is that being a squeaky wheel will get me greased. All the same, I recognize that many students in my place lacking the means to publicly tarnish their university’s reputation might well be overlooked, and that sucks.

I try not to take all of Trent’s administrative failings as indicative of my decision to stay here being some kind of mistake. All the same, it’s hard to feel valued as a student when this is what happens when you try to do something as integral and seemingly straightforward as registering for your classes.

First impressions may not be everything, but as they go this one does not bode well.

As of publication I am still unable to register for my classes. At this point it seems like there's nothing for me to do save toss this in the newsletter, make some dinner, and write something I've been putting off. A couple hours ago I might have decided to eat a litre of ice cream and watch five episodes of House M.D., but somewhere in the course of writing this I crossed the threshold from depression to acceptance.

Sure, everything sucks now, but let's just see what tomorrow brings, eh? 

If nothing else I hope that my misfortune proves entertaining.