It’s that time of the quarter to register again. I am personally not a fan of the UW’s registration system but what can you do but play the game and figure out how to win. I have had several quarters where I don’t get the classes I want, which is followed by the most stressful morning scrambling to fill in a decent schedule. I have found a way to register that has gotten me into the classes I want every time (4?) and I thought I’d share.
Step 1: ’twas the night before registration
Get all your classes into the Schedule Finder. Even if you found all your classes by hand without using the schedule finder, do it anyways.
Step 2: get your clock ready
Pull up the Official US Time in another browser window.
Step 3: pull the trigger
When the official time passes 5:55am (I usually wait for 5:55:05 to be safe), press the “Register for this schedule” button in the Schedule Finder next to the schedule you want.Dunzo. It is important to use the official time because I have trusted my computer’s clock to be accurate in the past and that assumption screwed me over.
Why it works
The UW Registration page opens up at 5:55. But if you preload your schedule into the Schedule Finder, you can simply push the register button instead of having to enter your SLNs into the registration page. 10 seconds saved could mean the difference of getting into a class or not. In addition, I have had the server time-out on me while trying to load the registration page and did not respond for over a minute. This is the best system I have found for registering for classes at UW. Have you found a better way?
4 replies on “UW Registration Method”
Have multiple browsers open at the same time, each with the schedule finder open. This way you get as many sessions as you have browsers. Starting at 5:53, continually cycle through the Go buttons. As soon as you have a bite on one of them, you can go back to sleep!
Strategy+1:
1. Do the schedule finder the night before
2. Click “register for this schedule”
3. Copy the URL from the page it takes you to, even though it says “Your registration period has not started yet” (or whatever)
4. Put that link in an html doc in a NetID-protected directory in Dante
5. Navigate to said html doc the next morning, and keep opening the link in a new tab
6. Profit
Does this have any benefit over simply refreshing the page that says “registration period hasn’t started yet”? Because the web request will still be coming from your local browser, right? Don’t see the advantage of the html being served from Dante. Maybe if you wrote a PHP script that repeatedly requested the page it would make a difference that it was on Dante?
I doubt there’s a real technical benefit, but I like it a lot more than having to type out and recheck everything at 5:51am when I feel like utter garbage. Plus, putting it on Dante can make you be sure to log into MyUW right away so that’s one less thing to muck up.
It might be that I worry too much about getting the wrong accounting quiz section or something like that because I hit B intstead of C, but it’s nice to just be able to wake up, navigate to one page, login, and click one link.