It’s that time of the year again: students are scrambling for PINs and pushing the bandwidth of the campus network with visits to ratemyprofessor.com. It’s registration time.

Registering for classes comes with a bunch of complications, and here at The Oswegonian, we want to make this process a lot easier for our peers. Before we go further, lets emphasize the most important thing to know: your registration date. If you are reading this right now and you do not know when you register, that is a big problem. Nothing is worse than missing your registration time. You don’t want to end up with that 8 a.m. class every day of the week.

First, you are going to want to get familiar with your adviser. Upper classmen, be sure to jump on your email and set up a meeting. For freshmen, advisers should have been getting in contact with you, but that is not enough. Just showing up to the meeting will not really accomplish anything if you want to be engaged in your future as a freshman and beyond that.

We know some people are not fans of their adviser but, as a student, you have got to think of them in another light. Advisers are supposed to make planning for the rest of our college careers easier, yes, but if you show up without an idea of what to do, what do you expect? These professors are teaching multiple classes, and it is pretty sad on their end to see a student completely disengaged with their future.

Here is how you prep for this meeting. Head to myOswego, which you can search for on the school’s general website, and look up some classes you are interested in. Thanks to DegreeWorks it is now much easier to see what you have to take and what you already have out of the way. Remember to check on the status of your classes too and have a back-up plan ready.

Now with this bundle of classes you have, map out your schedule. This will make things far less stressful. Being able to see your schedule puts you in the mindframe of it being an actual schedule, and not just a class you want to take. For example, those two-hour gaps seem great, but what are you going to do during them? Camping out in the lounge or the library seems like no big deal, but it can get old real quick. Think it over.

Lastly, keep two tabs open: myOswego and Rate My Professor. Rate My Professor is one of the best gifts the Internet has given students. Walking into a class without any knowledge of the teacher is rolling the dice, anything can happen. But beware, do not take every single review seriously. If a professor only has three reviews and is rated poorly, that is not much to go off of.  Read all the comments too, because let’s face it, some teachers are getting bad ratings for just giving work. Not all of our fellow students are the most dedicated scholars. A sad truth, but a truth nonetheless.

With all these tools and tips, registration is yours to conquer. So go forth and pick your classes and pray there are seats left.