Chapter 2 (cont.)

 

BOOK 'EM

 

Okay, so, I think one of the earliest bonding experiences at UD is making the excursion with your (new) floormates to the basement of Perkins, finding your books for the semester, standing in line, paying...and then dragging that shit back to your dorm.

 

Oh, how things have changed. At least, the options. In recent years, you can go online, pre-order your books, they pull them for you, and you just pick ‘em up. I’m almost offended by the convenience. And yep, I’m also aware that there are now several convenient off-campus options to purchase books as well. Oh, and yes, ya’ now go to the UD Barnes & Noble on Main Street to buy textbooks, as the Perkins bookstore is now bye-bye.

 

Well, I of course remember the good ole' days...bringing your semester schedule to the bookstore, and eyeballing all those shelves. The Practical Blue Hen had a great, calming explanation of how it was done, and that it wasn't really that difficult of a process…

 

...but I also remember the sense of doom when you found a book for a class, and the card indicated something like “Book 1 of 5” -- what the fuck, there's more?! You mean there's this much reading for this class? That might have been fodder for dropping that class, right there. I mean, I'm a ridiculously lazy reader...if I saw even "Book 1 of 1" I'd be like, "Oh, give me a break. Can't you just like, beam the information into my head?"

 

Anyway, there was then the actual standing in line and -- oofa -- paying for your books. Now, I was very fortunate in that I was on the Mom and Dad Scholarship plan (they paid), but signing off on that credit card total definitely served up a transitive, “Ouch.” I was a Business major, so had my share of fat textbooks -- but the majors that were notoriously annihilated by textbook totals were ChemE, MechE, you know, any hard science.

 

One curveball I remember like yesterday, was my first semester -- my Human Heredity and Development class. The professor wrote her own publication that was required reading for class, but for some reason wasn't available at the bookstore...it was a bound photocopied thing, that had to be bought at Kinko's on Elkton Road! Now, since I lived in Dickinson, the location wasn't a problem -- the thing was, this was 1991 and I had never heard of Kinko's! It wasn't like now, where as part of FedEx, Kinko’s are everywhere. I was like, “Um...what? The Kinks? Can I hear 'Lola?'”

 

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No Pain, No Gain

 

“The goal was to get in and out of the bookstore as soon as humanly possible. Often, at least one class didn't have your books in stock yet. And you just knew you were going to have to do the ‘Buffet Line Shimmy’ between teetering stacks of texts, and bug-eyed freshmen complaining that their Biology books cost $175. Standing in line was downright Draconian. There were no short lines and the collective weight of your purchases averaged a metric ton. Good times.”

 

- Kevin F, UD '90

 

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SHOPPING FOR CLASSES

 

Forget about the horror of Drop / Add for a second, let’s first talk about registering for classes. You know, the thing you first did to compose your semester schedule, and pray that you actually got what you wanted, first shot.

 

Yep, there was a time when you had to actually stand in line, just to register. Fortunately I never had to endure it…but right through the mid to late '80s, the Rodney Dangerfield Back to School course registration scenario was the norm. Classic Rodney: “Look at this. This is worse than the track!” And yes, UD kids would camp out for course registration, as well as for Drop / Add. Like they were going for U2 tickets, or something.

 

As far as I understand it, “Drop / Add Day,” which existed through about 1990, was an event of epic proportions. The deal was you had to go to the infamous basement of Hullihen Hall to pick up a Drop / Add scan sheet, and a list of departmental locations…to then stand in the respective departmental lines, in your desperate attempt to adjust your schedule. All of this was of course pre-Student Services building, which opened for the '92 - '93 school year.

 

During the years I attended UD, they started to really reform the process, with improvements every year I was there. By 1992, Drop / Add had progressed to the phone-in stage...but the calls were answered by a live person! You know, probably some UD kids your exact same age, working it as a summer job...and probably were on the receiving end of a lot of frustrated bitching, of other students trying to pull together the schedule they needed.

 

Then by 1994 it became fully automated with phone commands, and they were smart enough to program in "IF / THEN" functionality -- meaning, ONLY drop a class you already had scheduled, IF the other class you'd like to replace it with, was indeed open. So, at least you held on to your fallback plan...

 

...because, previous to that, sometimes you had to roll-the-dice: drop a class to make room in your schedule, and then cross your fingers that the other class you wanted at that same time was actually open. However, because it was a faulty system, it was possible to lose the original class (because somebody else scooped it up right after your dropped), and not get the other one you were after! Thusly, losing both classes. And when that happened, you wanted to break something. Or someone.

 

Anyway, there was finally the "just show up on the first day" tactic -- don't think I personally ever had to resort to it. This was if you simply attended the first class or two, the professor often could see that there was physically room in the class for you to sit -- or maybe some other people dropped the class -- and they’d then sign a form for you, okaying you to officially add. I saw this quite a few times at UD, definitely in those tiered first floor Purnell rooms. Hey, there’s no business like being a Business major!

 

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Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

 

“We registered IN PERSON when we were registering for classes. We had to go down to the main registration office, stand in line (for hours!), turn in our sheets with the bubbles filled-in with a #2 pencil and hope that the ‘computer’ could read them properly. We chose our classes VERY carefully because we knew that we'd have to fill out those same sheets and stand in those same long lines during Drop / Add if we wanted to change our schedules in any way. You could literally spend half a day there and then be told that you'd filled something out wrong and have to go back, fix it, and get back on the same line you'd just come off of. Sometimes you'd get someone nice and you'd be able to go back to that person once you'd made the changes and not have to wait in line the whole time again.

 

You had these huge books with all of the university's classes for the semester published in them, and had to go through the entire book to pick out your courses, having to go department-by-department to meet your Group A’s, Group B’s, etc. Ah! The days before computers! Years later when I went back to grad school, I was SO excited about online registration…what a treat!”

 

- Sandey, UD '90

 

Born to Run

 

“Yes, I had to spend ‘Drop / Add Day’ running around campus standing in line to make out my schedule. Even though I made my schedule the previous semester, something would come up that forced me to change a class or two…or all of them!  It was not fun, especially when I really wanted to get into a class that was very small, yet popular -- like Philosophical Ideals in Rock 'n' Roll Lyrics -- yes, this was a real class that I regrettably never got into.”

 

- Edward P, UD '93

 

Getting your Zzzzzzzs

 

“Kids, remember, if you're going to drop a class...you actually have to drop it. If you just stop going you'll get some strange black marks on your grade report like ‘LWF’ (Listener Withdrawn while Failing) which meant I changed to a listener, but stopped going and didn't take the exams, and therefore failed (is that possible?) a class I wasn't even taking for credit. Or, you might get the dreaded ‘Z’ if that's still around, which means you never showed up, but didn't drop it, so you failed it.”

 

- Anonymous, UD '95