By Mariam Keita ‘24
Managing Editor of Web & News Editor
As the start of the semester drew near, many students were left scrambling to find new courses after some classes were canceled within weeks or even days of the commencement of the fall semester on Monday, Aug. 30. At least one cancellation was directly related to Mount Holyoke’s return to in-person classes.
Sarah Parsons ’24 was notified in an email from the Office of the Registrar that their 200-level geography course, “Human Dimensions of Environmental Change,” had been canceled on Aug. 27, just three days before classes were set to begin.
“I am in the process of finding a replacement course. The Registrar offered an alternative course that meets at the same time, but it is an introductory course in a different department. I understand it’s a difficult thing to figure out last minute, and I am sure everyone is doing their best to fix the situation, but it has been frustrating to try to figure this out while classes are starting,” Parsons wrote in an email to the Mount Holyoke News.
After some time, Parsons was eventually able to find another 200-level course to replace the one that had been canceled.
“I’m taking Atmosphere & Weather … it’s another geography course, so it’s fulfilling similar requirements for me,” Parsons wrote in a follow-up email to the Mount Holyoke News this week. “I am enjoying it. It’s very different from the canceled course, but I like the content.”
Much like Parsons, Dana Seville ’24 was notified that her introductory math course had been canceled in an email from the Registrar, which she received on Aug. 25.
“I don’t understand why it took them until one week before the start of classes to find out that information,” Seville told the Mount Holyoke News via email. “To be in the course we had to take short tests to qualify … I felt as though my time was wasted once the course was canceled.”
Seville was unable to find an alternative math course at Mount Holyoke, as all of the other math courses that she could find were already at capacity. Seville ultimately found a class that would allow her to fulfill the science and mathematics distribution requirement as intended.
“I did find an astronomy course that would fit the gap in the amount of credits I would get this semester. It’s not a course I would have thought I would be taking, but I wanted to meet a requirement this semester,” Seville wrote. “At first I was worried that the cancellation of my course would affect my progress because so many classes are waitlisted, but my advisor helped me a little bit … by telling me to keep searching.”
Dara Weingarten ’24 also had a course cancelled just five days before the semester began. After the initial notification from the professor, Weingarten said the Registrar recommended that students look for classes in the Five College Consortium, as the classes at Mount Holyoke were largely full and heavily waitlisted by that point.
Upon independently continuing her search, Weingarten was able to locate a replacement math course offered by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For Weingarten, an athlete on Mount Holyoke’s rowing team, this registration cycle was particularly stressful.
“There’s a requirement for how many credits you have to have by a certain date. Last Friday [Sept. 3] was the deadline to have at least 12 credits. I started off that morning with four,” Weingarten said. “That entire day, I was running around trying to get registered for those classes,” which Weingarten expressed is a much longer process at UMass Amherst. Weingarten was eventually able to register for a course load, but it “was a struggle.”