• enrollment,  enrolment,  grad school

    i’m lovin it

    hello, lovin the new theme
    there are 3 courses that i need to take to complete my degree requirements. for the rest of my courses, i am conflicted as to whether i should choose bird courses that aren’t directly related to my degree or to choose 3/4-level year courses that are related to my degree and probably require more work. are these different types of courses weighed differently by grad schools? the grad school im interested in said they rank applicants based on GPA of the most recent 10 FCE but do they still consider the types of courses that are taken?

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    hey there,

    you noticed the theme change! it’s still very much a work in progress (read: kind of dull atm) but i’m looking into spicing it up a bit. lemme know if you have any suggestions. but yeah, hopefully it’s a tad bit easier on the eyes now.

    the thing with grad schools is that what they’ll consider and the weight they place on different elements of your application varies so much between schools. i’m glad you put time into researching your grad school– but i’d encourage you to take it a step further and maybe give their admissions office a call. i don’t know if they’ll be able to give you a super direct answer, but it’s gotta be better than what i can approximate with the very limited info i have.

    sorry i couldn’t be more helpful! my best guess is that it’s probably safer to take those related higher-level courses. but even just thinking about that much extra work, especially if it doesn’t turn out to be necessary, kind of hurts. so yeah– would encourage you to go straight to the real sources for this one.

    be Boundless,

    aska

     

  • enrollment,  enrolment

    you no big dumb

    Hi I am big dumb but for signing up for courses on acorn, do you take the course you sign up for both days or both times that it says you have to take them? Or do you or someone else ultimately choose the day and time you take said course based on the other courses you have?

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    hey there,

    i don’t think you’re big dumb. uni is a different system to adjust to. big dumb would be having this question and not bothering to ask it. you no big dumb.

    what i’m assuming you mean by this is that you’ve got a lecture where you sign up for one section, but it’s held at two different points in the week. for example, mondays from 4-5 and wednesdays from 4-5. for example, HIS103 is held 2-3pm on both monday and weds.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    in this kind of case, you’re required to go to both. if there’s a longer, chunkier option only offered on one day, i tend to prefer those options just ’cause it’s one fewer time i need to drag myself across campus to class. it’s less walking, too. the optimal play for laziness. but we don’t always get a choice, do we?

    by ‘both times,’ there’s also a chance you’re looking at something with multiple lecture sections. something like this (gotta love gently informative screenshots):

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    in this case, where you’ve got two different lecture codes (0101 and 0201), then you’ll only be allowed to select one when enrolment time comes.

    the bottom line is that you make your decisions! no one else is gonna mess around with your schedule once it’s set– unless something goes deeply, madly wrong. i would encourage you to use the timetable to plan if you’re not already doing so. you’ll be able to add courses and click on that lil ‘view timetable plan’ button to check out what your schedule will actually look like.

    hope this helped and best of luck getting into the sections you want!

    be Boundless,

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment

    we love specifics!

    any word yet on when course selection will be?

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    hello hello,

    yes, actually, i’ve been planning to put an update out and this has been a good reminder! big thanks to u of t memes for true blue teens, actually, for providing me with this info before i found it myself. it’s listed on the artsci website, but is highkey hard to dig up because i guess we still havin’ issues.

    since you’re reading this already, and since i promised updates, here are the dates. we love specifics!

    first years can see their start time on july 19 and their course enrolment begins july 25.

    second years get their start time july 12 and can start enrolment july 18.

    third years’ dates are the 8th and 15th.

    fourth and fifth years get their start time today (july 3) and can register in a week, on the 10th.

    where can you see your start time, you ask? ACORN has your back for this one.

    don’t forget to plan your schedule out using the timetable, and be aware of your POSt prereqs and breadth requirements! best of luck to everyone with the whole process. hope the start times are favourable and yall get the classes you need.

    be Boundless,

    aska

  • courses,  enrollment,  enrolment

    who wants to be average anyway

    How many courses do you recommend people to take each semester?

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    hello friend,

    five courses a semester is considered the average number– it’s how many you need to be taking to graduate in four years, if you don’t plan on taking any summer school.

    big thanks to the university of utah for this snazzy gif that only reads in my head as sarcastic. suMMer sCHOol, oh! yeah! i love attending class in 30-degree heat while my friends upload instastories from asia and europe. this is my idea of a good time.

    real talk, though– what i would really recommend is that you take things at your own pace. the adjustment from high school to university (if i can make that assumption, given your question) can be rough in different ways. i mean, not for everyone– we get it, jim, you’re taking six courses and pasted your 99 in bio to your dorm room wall. and while we all know a jim, we’re not all jim. jim will probably burn out anyway.

    as far as fall/winter is concerned, you’ll need three courses to qualify as a full-time student, and you can take up to a maximum of six without special permission. i haven’t met anyone yet on three– the most common loads are four, five, and six.

    tl:dr, your options for a full-time sem of fall/winter study (and what kind of first year/carb they make you) are:

    option 1! four courses

    you know your limit and you play within it. or maybe you just took one of the few APs u of t actually accepts and want to ease things off after an anxiety- and caffeine-fueled high school career. either way, you’re not looking to bring anyone down; you just wanna look after yourself and get things done without crying too much.

    if you were a carb, you’d probably be brown rice. healthy and quite wholesome.

    option 2! five courses

    you’re a go-with-the flow kinda kid. you probably went to university because everyone else was doing it too, or because your parents told you to. you don’t know what you want to do with your degree yet, or even what POSt you want. what’s a POSt? post… what? post-degree, you’re headed for a standard nine-to-five with an hour-long lunch break where all your coworkers talk about their kids and the weather.

    you, my friend, are a slice of bread. pretty standard. not too interesting. good with peanut butter.

    option 3! six courses

    you like to live life on the edge– of sanity? of a robarts study carrel at 3 in the morning? no one else is really sure. you’re highkey headed somewhere, whether that’s absolute greatness or the deep dark pits of study burnout. maybe you’re crazy. maybe you just have a better work ethic than the rest of us. maybe she’s born with it. maybe it’s maybelline.

    your designated carbohydrate is kraft dinner mac and cheese. can’t be eaten for too many years in a row without doing some kinda damage to your body. a lil concerning. but pretty dang amazing in the moment.

    obviously, take ’em with a grain of salt. i’m no buzzfeed quiz.

    regardless of which option you choose, it might be useful to know the uni will probably charge you the same tuition. that is, if you’re in artsci– if you’re not, i would encourage you to look into your fees. just to show you what i mean, last year a first-year domestic student in innis college paid a flat program fee of $6,780 whether their courseload was four, five, or six. once they dropped below an average of four per semester, they’d pay per course.

    so, purely financially speaking, you kinda get more worth outta things if you’re taking a load of five or six courses. especially since, if you’re only taking four at a time, you’ll have to take summers, extra semesters, or even an extra year to finish your degree.

    like i said, though– if you have the resources to do so, take your time. i know plenty of really smart people who plan to stay an extra year or sem. don’t feel too much pressure to do things the “normal” way. remember that you can always register for five and drop down later, if things get to be too much.

    be Boundless,

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment

    i guess that makes us all telepaths

    Hey aska! I’m sorry if this question has been asked before but how do we find out when to enrol in courses?

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    hello friend,

    no worries at all! i did a recent post on this, which you can check out here. basically the gist of it is, look out for an email from your registrar. if you don’t get one by mid-july-ish, shoot me another question and i’ll try to find out what’s up. but yeah, you should definitely be notified by the school when it’s about to begin! i don’t have access to those specific dates right now, but it’s pretty safe to say course enrolment should be at the end of july. that is, if it’s anything like last year.

    so like, expect the school to speak! telepathically! to you through a machine! in order to get your hands on that specific information. sounds like amazing fun. file that under things that make me nostalgic about entering first year. ah, sarcasm’s so hard over the internet.

    over n out,

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment

    s p a c e

    thank you so much for answering my question on priority enrolment! i had a second question about that: if i have priority for a certain course does that mean i get to choose that specific course at an earlier date than my other courses? or do i still choose all the courses at the same time?

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    hey,

    if you have priority for a course, it doesn’t mean you get to enrol in it earlier than your others, no. how it works instead is that enrolment for everyone else opens up later– meaning those without the priority designation need to check back later on and see if there’s still space.

    according to what the timetable says at this moment, if you’ve got priority enrolment, you’re among a select group of students that can register before july 31. there’s a small gap in course enrolment aug 1, then once august 2 rolls around anyone else in artsci can vie for a spot. meanwhile, students from utm or utsc seeking to enrol in utsg courses will be able to do so after august 9.

    hope this makes sense and lemme know if you need any other help with enrolment/navigating the system/etc. etc. i take fun questions, too! been a while since anything spicy has hit the ask box. 

    over n out,  

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment

    half? full?

    when do you do course selection for half year winter courses? do you do it at the same time as fall courses? how do you know if a course is half or full year?

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    hey,

    course selection for the half-year winter courses takes place at the same time as fall courses, yes! we’re talking enrollment around the end of july– stay posted for an email from your registrar. obviously, space allowing, you’ll be able to switch those winter courses around for much longer than you will the fall ones.

    info dump time: you know if a course is half or full year based on the letter right after the course code. for example, ENG102H1S has an ‘H’ after the ENG102. an ‘H’ indicates a half-year course, whereas a ‘Y’ would tell you it’s a full year

    what do the other numbers and letters mean, do you ask? the ‘1’ indicates that it’s a course at st. george; i’m pretty sure ‘5’ means UTM and i guess if you see another number we’re talking utsc. meanwhile, the ‘s’ tells you which semester the course is offered in (first or second, in this case second).

    so if ENG102 was a full-year course offered at UTM, it would read as ‘ENG102Y5’. if it was a half-year course still at st. george but in the first sem, it would read ‘ENG102H1F’.

    hope this helped! writing this post reminds me that i have all this knowledge floating around in my head that is absolutely, entirely, totally useless outside of u of t. 

    over n out,

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment,  priority

    priorities, priorities

    who gets priority enrolment for courses?

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    hey there,

    the easy response to this is– the people who need the course most get priority enrolment. for example, kiddos in the anthropology specialist/major program have priority when enrolling in ANT207, because they need it to complete their program. and a lot of first year lifesci courses give priority to science/compsci kids, because they’ll need those courses to make POSt.

    i mean, in the making of this post i saw a few weird priority assignments that i couldn’t really explain, so maybe that’s not the whole story? but i have word that the timetable has a few issues right now, so there’s also a chance that’s it.

    not sure if you’re aware of this already, but when you’re planning your courses out you can check who has priority enrollment! as long as you’re using the timetable, you should see a lil yellow tab with a dropdown icon. just click it, and it’ll give you a quick rundown of who can enrol and when. this is true for restrictions as well. slightly crappy screenshot attached for your reference!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    hope this helped!

    over n out,

    aska

  • enrollment,  enrolment,  first year

    real q tho: is it enrolment or enrollment

    Hey, is there anyway to know when course registration is open? Like do they send you an email or is there anyway to check on the site?

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    hello hello,

    course registration! still a couple months away– what a keener. that’s okay, i was one too.

    i went through my inbox to see if i ever got an email from the school regarding this. what i found was that sometime in the middle of july, my registrar emailed me with a reminder that course enrolment was about to open. last year, enrolment for first-years actually began on july 26– i’m not sure yet when this year’s date is, but hopefully that gives you some idea as to the timeline.

    a few days before enrolment starts (july 20, last year) you can check ACORN for your ‘start-time.’ if you’re not familiar, this is basically when course enrolment opens to YOU– it’s a staggered opening, i guess because the system can’t handle thousands of frantic log-ins at once. i’d recommend that you prep your enrolment cart sometime before your start time, so you can just check-out and save yourself the stress of adding courses then.

    anyway, the artsci website is still messed, but if you wanna read up more on this you can check out this link. innis college, that lovely mythical place, also has an academic orientation up on youtube if you need help figuring out the calendar and course selection.

    in short– keep an eye on your inbox in july for an email from your registrar! or you can stick to obsessively checking ACORN for changes like lil first year me did. your call, my dude.

    over n out,

    aska

  • arts & sciences,  courses,  CR/NCR,  credits,  enrollment,  enrolment,  GPA,  prereqs,  repeating course

    we love a good second chance

    Hey, so I wanted to know if you can retake a course you “no credited”? I want to major in sociology but I took only SOC102, LWD SOC103, and NCR SOC150 ( first 2 yrs were tough) There’s only certain combinations allowed and my only hope really is if I’m allowed to try SOC150 again.  Any advice?!

    Thanks!

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    hi there,

    did some digging for ya, and i’m not gonna lie– initially, it looked like it was gonna be bad news. as far as the artsci website says, you shouldn’t ever cr/ncr a course if there’s even a remote chance you’ll need it for program enrolment. the implication being, you don’t have many options if you’ve already done so.

    HOWEVER. i read through half of the faculty of arts and sciences rules and regulations to see if i could find you a loophole, and it looks like there might actually be one.

    chelsea peretti television GIF by Brooklyn Nine-Nine

    apparently if you’ve already passed a course, you’re not allowed to retake it; that includes courses you’ve passed with ‘CR’. but under the ‘repeating passed courses’ section, the rules allow for a single repeat of a course to achieve the minimum entry mark for a program like soc. this retake won’t count towards your gpa or graduation requirements, but it will be on your academic record.

    either way, what’s important in your case is that yes, you are able to give SOC150 another shot!

    in order to make it happen, you’ll need to get in contact with your college registrar. they’ll be able to give you further advice as well as enrol you in the course (from what i’ve read, i don’t think you can enrol in it yourself). i believe you’ll have lower priority to get in than students taking the course for the first time, but don’t let that stop you from going after this.

    best of luck,
    aska
  • admissions,  computer science,  enrolment

    so many details so little answers (sorry!)

    Hey guys!

    I know i am pretty early but i need information as early as i can.

    I want to apply to for Computer Science at University of Toronto St George for September 2018. I am an adult student so ill be taking most of my courses online and in summer, night and adult school. So the courses i am planning to take are:

    – ENG4U (already did it though when i was in high school)
    – MCV4U
    – BAT4M > accounting
    – CGW4U > world issues
    – MDM4U > data management
    – SES4U > earth & space science

    So apart from the obvious english and calculus, do you think the rest of the courses are acceptable?

    Plus for calculus….well so my transcript shows a mark for the course but i never actually completed it. I wanted to drop it because i know it was going to be pretty hard since my dad was going through an operation and i just wasn’t in a  good state to focus on such an important course also since i was taking ENG4U and SCH4U. My stupid mistake was that i was late and dropped it right after the dead line so even though i officially dropped the course and never wrote the exam, the mark still showed up on my transcript. Do you guys have any idea how Soft will look at that? And is should explain them my situation right?

    Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!

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    hi!

    i don’t know if i can say that these courses are “acceptable” or not, i can only tell you that the only courses required are english and calculus. if you are worried about your calculus mark (you said you wanted to drop it, but it was past the deadline, so i’m assuming you didn’t get the mark you wanted), i would suggest retaking the course.

    as for whether or not the courses are “acceptable”, i would get in contact with enrolment services. they would have the most up-to-date and relevant information that i might not be privy to as a wee student blogger. they have the best info on the mystical enrolment process and admission requirements.

    i really hope that helps. best of luck!

    xoxo,

    aska

  • ccit,  enrolment,  UTM,  wait list

    waitlists do not mean the end

    Hi! I got accepted into Humanities at UtM, and although I have not yet accepted, I want to switch from Humanities to CCIT. However, when I went on my friend’s ACORN account, it said that the two pre-req. courses lectures had blocked enrollment. Can I still try to take those classes or will I be wait listed for a long time? 🙁
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