Have you said or thought that this week? If so, you’re probably not alone. Every registration period one section or one course seems to fill up much faster than others. When that happens, there are a few things that we do to help students. First, when all the seats in the course are full, we ALWAYS encourage students to add to the waitlist. This helps us get a true sense of how many students want to take the course and it gives us a case for trying to add another section or increasing the enrollment limit in the current section.

Naturally, there are many logistical elements that go into this process that impact our ultimate success in being able to offer more seats of a certain course. First, we need a place to teach it – so we consult with the appropriate people to find a room that will work for the class. If we decide to just increase the size of the current section, we need to be sure the room assigned can handle it. We also need someone to teach and additional section of the course if we go that route – so we look through the ranks of full time instructors, adjuncts and others to find a qualified person. Then, we go through the process of getting the course posted on Wiser and thus available for student enrollment. This can whole process can be quite lengthy. When we’ve been able to confirm additional seats, we then send an email (through Wiser, to your UMB account) to all enrolled and waitlisted students to notify them of the new seats. When a new section is made available, anyone can swap into or add the new section. When additional seats are added to the existing section, students are moved off the waitlist in order. There is no really way to know how long all of this will take, so we appreciate patience with the process.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, there are times when we cannot offer additional seats in a given term for a variety of reasons. When this happens, we look to add another section for the following term. You should also note that we only consider adding extra seats when an entire course is full – so if your first choice for MGT 330 is full, for example, but there are seats in other sections of the course, you should try to take one of those instead. We encourage students who are having scheduling difficulty to see an advisor as we can talk with individual students about specific options for staying on track for graduation and completing certain requirements.