A student registers for classes. Courtesy| Collegian Archives

What does watching the sun rise, slamming energy drinks, and the booming sounds of “Fergalicious” have in common?

It may sound like a crazy night on Manning Street, but it’s actually how several students prepare to register for classes.

Registration season begins when Douglas McArthur, Hillsdale College registrar, sends out the course catalog in a mass email, as he did on Oct. 29 this year. Then the chaos begins.

Junior Tully Mitchell and her roommate, junior Alya MacManaway, invented a registration ritual in their fall freshman semester and they’ve kept it ever since.

“We’ll wake up before sunrise, grab whatever caffeinated beverages we put in the fridge the night before, and march up the hill together while blasting 2000s club songs on my speaker,” Mitchell said. “It’s our favorite bonding tradition together.”   

Senior Parker Reed said his friend group would sit on the couches in the Grewcock Student Union and compete to see who could register first.

“It was almost like gambling,” Reed said. “It was really fun.”

Senior Seamus Welton said he has had the same routine since sophomore year.

“I wake up at 6:59 a.m., press the register button, then go back to sleep,” Welton said. “Sometimes I wander up and down the halls and listen to the weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Underclassmen say they cannot afford to be so lackadaisical with registering. As seniors and juniors register, sophomores and freshmen watch in horror as seats in their desired classes fill with upperclassmen.

Freshman Mary Anderson has already reshuffled three of her scheduled classes — her preferred biology class filled up during sophomore registration.

Registration, she said, will be rough.

If her planned classes don’t pan out, Anderson said she will “cry, eat a lot of chocolate, and then figure out what to do.”

This is in sharp contrast to seniors.

“This year I’m a senior, so for the first time ever, there’s no one registering before me. It makes me worry a lot less,” senior Katrin Surkan said.

Some students say registration is a game of strategy. Whether it’s class selection or meeting with a professor, many students have a plan.

“I’ll register for 24 or 25 credits so that I can choose which courses I want to keep and which I want to drop later,” junior Joseph Petullo said. “Often going in, my plan is not set in stone. Maybe I’m debating taking the class or if I want to audit it, but I want to be signed up.”

It’s easier, Petullo said, to drop the extra classes before the next semester starts than to petition a professor whose class you did not get in.

Freshman Daniel Ekstrom said he is going to focus on completing Hillsdale’s core curriculum before starting any major-specific classes.

“I’m still a freshman,” Ekstrom said. “I might as well get all the core classes out of the way first before getting to the upper level classes.”

Many classes, he said, like Principles of Accounting, require students to be sophomores. Many of the American history classes also have American Heritage — which is a core class — as a prerequisite, so there is a mandated order to taking certain classes.

”There are more empty sections for core classes, so if you don’t get into one, you have other options,” Ekstrom said.

Junior Levi Mendel said he began prioritizing politics classes during his second semester as a freshman based on advice he was given early on in his academic career.

“A professor told me to take a few major classes early so I would know whether I liked the major,” Mendel said. “I did, and it was good advice.”

Picking which professor to take is an important part of scheduling, Reed said. Students turn to friends, student chats, and Rate My Professor — a website where students can grade a professor and leave notes about the class — to assess the pros and cons of signing up for a specific course.

Students often choose professors for non-major classes based on a combination of three criteria: class difficulty, whether it fits in their schedule, or whether the professor is entertaining.

Reed said he chose his American Heritage professor because he heard from other students that the professor did not assign a lot of homework and jokes around with students.

Some students have found ways to ensure they do not fail through a precise routine.

“I get my regular laptop, spare laptop, and my phone, sit in an AJ’s booth, plug them both in and open up and split screen on the laptop, hitting refresh on all of them, starting at 6:59:40,” sophomore Matthew Tolbert said. “I keep hitting the register button.”

Tolbert said he has gotten into every class with this method.

Many students use a similar strategy, opening many tabs on their computers and using multiple electronic devices.

Reed said he previously used the Hillsdale Go app when it still worked.

“I think it used a different service because it wasn’t based in Hillsdale specifically,” Reed  said. “Enough people picked up on that, so it wasn’t as effective.”

Sophomore Isabelle Ekstrom said she once knew a girl who registered using an XBox.

“It was connected to the ethernet,” Isabelle said, “She was sure to get every single section that she wanted.”

Ethernet, a type of internet connection often used in schools, hospitals, and offices, is more reliable, fast, and secure than traditional wireless networks. The combination of gaming console and ethernet connection was obviously successful for said student.

Even with these traditions, the most common experience of all is an apathetic senior class. Many seniors have lost the anxiety to register at 7 a.m. altogether.

“We can register any time before the juniors and still get into all the classes we want,” senior Eva Lindsay said.

Reed said that, by now, he has finished most of his major classes and only needs a handful of 1-credits and minor classes to graduate.

“I’m about to graduate, so I’m basically chilling,” Reed said. “I clustered my academic classes in the middle years, so now I’m at the tail end.”