Picking my first year courses and I was wondering do a lot of first years not get into the courses they want due to the amount of people signing up? I don’t really have backup courses….

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hey there,

as with everything at uoft, that question depends on a tangle of finicky little conditions. because why would things ever be simple at this university?

i’m gonna try and give you a general sketch of how course enrolment tends to go down, and then you can make your game plan from there.

the lowdown:

the faculty of arts & science, in their infinite wisdom, knows very well what courses first year students need to get into subject POSts. there’s a group of regular suspects: BIO120+130, CHM138+139, MAT133/135+136, PHY131+132, PSY100, CSC108H1, SOC101, ENG140, CLA160, POL101. and i didn’t even have to look at the course calendar for that. come at me, faculty registrars.

because everyone needs to take the same handful of classes, they try to set it up so that there’s enough space for you all. they do this by 1) making the classes MASSIVE, and 2) giving certain students priorities. a priority is basically a restriction on a course that lets some students enrol in it before others.

let’s take CSC108H1 – introduction to computer programming – as an example to see how this works.

if you take a look at CSC108 on the timetable (tip: bookmark the timetable now; it’ll by your absolute best friend for course planning), you’ll see that there is a ‘P’ under the column ‘Enrolment Indicator.’ that ‘P’ stands for priority.

if you click on ‘See Details,’ you’ll see that first-year UTSG Computer Science students have priority for this course. that means they’ll be able to enrol in the course earlier than everyone else. this is called the ‘priority period.’

on July 30th, when course enrolment opens for first-year students, first year computer science students ONLY will be able to enrol in CSC108H1. then, when the priority lifts on August 7th at 6am, everyone else will have the opportunity to sign up for the course.

what this system boils down to is this: if you’re in the priority group for a big class, you should be fine. if you’re planning on taking any courses that are smaller, more obscure, or that you don’t have priority for, i would highly recommend you get yourself some backups, pronto.

notice i said ‘backups,’ plural. the faculty does everything they can to stop course enrolment from spiralling into a hunger games-esque nightmare, but there’s only so much they can do.

ALSO: make sure that you’re ready to start enrolling in courses the MINUTE YOUR START TIME HITS. have all the course codes of the classes you want to take (including backups) ready to go. if your start time is at 6am, you best be at your computer and ready to go at 5:55. too early? need to sleep? too bad. i promise you this won’t be the first time uoft forces you out of bed.

keep in mind that first-years are the last people who get to sign up for courses, so you’re at a bit of a disadvantage already. don’t’make it worse by showing up late to the party.

finally, remember that loads of people will drop out of classes after the first week, so it’s a good idea to enrol in place-holder courses while you wait for a class you absolutely NEED to become available again. waitlists are a great way to do this easily.

as long as you unquestioningly follow all of aska’s advice, you should be able to get into most of the classes you want.

cheers,

aska