07
Oct
Registering for GEMs
For a taste of what is to come at local universities, look no further to our local polytechnics.
General Elective Module selection makes students act like hungry mongrels begging for food that’s deliberately made scarce. The seats in each GEM class are sliced up, and some are released for the taking during the multiple registration periods. It’s a system designed to prevent people from dragging large groups of friends into a single class.
It’s also a system that makes it hard for me to get what I want. Last semester, I missed out on taking the Revealing Eye in Digital Photography elective module when the administrative system crashed during my registration period. I was very, very much annoyed that the computers were not robust enough to handle hundreds of students knocking at its door every second. I mean — come on! You know there are ravenous lions coming! Prepare for it!
At least to their credit, they did bulk up the servers this time. Everything still started bogging down the last 3 minutes towards the start of the registration period, but at least I could still go in to snatch the GEM I needed. To be on the safe side, I had both my laptop and desktop logged in to the school administrative system. The 6 browsers on each computer, FireFox, Maxthon, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari were all pointed to the school website.
I was prepared to go over-kill for my GEMs. Thank goodness it wasn’t really needed though; I managed to snatch Learning to Learn for Fridays with only 2 seats left to spare, and 2 minutes of torturous waiting after clicking on the extremely terse confirmation screen. I gave two sighs of relief, and checked 2 of my browsers to make sure I wasn’t thinking too much when I thought that the module didn’t actually register.
Phew! At least this is my very last GEM in poly… Repeating the same elaborate procedure next semester might get somebody hurt real bad… I won’t say who.