Telebears Fun

July 29, 1999

Telebears Fun

First off, an update on my midterm: YAY I got an A... but I messed up a horribly easy problem... for those of you interested, here's the part of the problem I messed up, see if you can find the error (duh.)

[((3)^(1/2))/2]^(2) = 9/4

Hee hee. Okay, that was bad. Anyway, the point of this update is signing up for classes. At Berkeley, we have a telephone-in system called "Telebears." To sign up for classes, you have to wait for your Telebears appointment time for phase I and phase II, and then dial in the classes you want. (In Phase I, you can sign up for 10 units of classes, and then for Phase II, you can sign up for the rest) Sounds very convient, but the pitfall of that system is that if you have a bad appointment time, you're jipped. While their ranking system for telebears on paper seems fair, when you personally don't get into a class because of a bad telebears time, everything about the system seems wrong. Right now, I'm in the "This is totally unfair" stage. This is their ranking system:

In order of priority:

Disabled Students and Athletes
Seniors
Transfer Students
Juniors
Freshmen
Sophmore

And for those of you who weren't paying attention, guess what grade I'm in? So yeah, I had a bad telebears time for Phase I and Phase II. So now, I'm on the wait list for two out of four classes. I'll probably get into these classes, but the problem is that I have to be enrolled in more than 13.5 units if I want to keep my financial aide money. If I'm not confirmed for that many units by the third week of school, I'll have to send back my loan money!!!

That is so royally messed up. Right now I've only confirmed 8.5 units, so I could possibly be kissing my loan check good-bye. Not to mention that if I don't get into my history class, I could be kissing my major requirment deadline good-bye as well. (I have to take history before I can declare to get into my intended major, political science.)

Ahh yes, public schools and the way everything is limited. If they knew that seven hundred people wanted to take history, why do they only have six hundred seats? And if they knew that no one was interested in math 54 with computers, why must they take up resources for that many seats when so many more people would be happier if they just added more seats to regular math 54? I just have to ask this question, and those of you who are in private colleges can tell me the answer: do you guys go through this kind of headache when you're signing up for classes?

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