Missing SIS

I hear that course registration for the spring semester starts this week. I’m studying abroad again next semester so I won’t be joining you for that fun process, but it takes me back to my own comical registration process here in Ghana -- a veritable scavenger hunt which, believe it or not, made me miss iSIS (or I guess we’re back to SIS). The University of Ghana is one of the premier universities here, and it’s modernizing quickly. Still, registration revealed one of the ways in which it is struggling to catch up.

For starters, please be grateful for those course handbooks which list every course. UG has those too -- except it only publishes them every couple of years, and they list all courses that might, maybe, possibly be offered. My initial list of courses totaled about 20, since I knew many wouldn’t actually be available.

Our registration was further complicated by a strike by the university’s faculty. Usually, academic departments will post final course offerings on their bulletin boards right before registration. (Again, nothing online -- you have to physically go to each department to check the listings. And Tufts has spoiled us: on a normal-sized campus, such an undertaking is an hours-long workout.) With the strike, many departments chose not to put up their offerings. So we went into registration unsure of which courses would actually be available.

It gets better. Technical limitations and the unpredictability of power and WiFi made online registration impractical in the past. This was one of the first years that UG had online registration, which represents great progress … except that when we tried to register, something in the portal was broken. We could get a few steps into the process before being told we didn’t have clearance to register. They tried to fix it, but we were eventually asked to simply write down our course requests -- the staff would input them manually later. Again, we still had NO IDEA what courses were ACTUALLY being offered. It was sometime around this point when it all became comical to me.

We ended up having an interim period of classes while the strike wound down. These classes were arranged especially for international students, so most of our course requests didn’t matter. Once the strike ended and more courses became available, I chose to stick with most of the courses I had already started during the strike. The challenge here, though, was navigating timetables. At Tufts, you’re given the time slot for courses up front (everyone knows which time period the J+ block is, right??). For our registration in August, we went to each department to look at the timetables. Most students at UG only take courses in the department in which they are pursuing a degree, so overlap is impossible. But for international students like myself who are sampling from multiple departments, I had to make impossible choices, like between Studies of African Poetry or Philosophy of Development.

Finally, the online portal worked and we entered our course requests. We also had to submit several hard-copy forms to the International Programmes Office AND visit each department to register with them. This whole process probably ended up taking three or four weeks -- at the time of our first dance class assessment, there were still people who weren’t officially enrolled in the class.

It sounds messy -- and trust me, it felt messy -- but it was a great lesson in dealing with the realities and limitations of the university, and it ultimately was just pretty funny. But I swear, I’ll never complain about SIS again.