Wilma Tynkkynen
In late August, incoming first-year students received an email from AUC, announcing the course schedules for the 16-week period. The same email mentioned that students would be informed about their January-period intensives “later in September”.
When September turned into October, however, first-year students were still without knowledge about their courses for their January intensive period. On 11 October, a month and a half into the semester, students finally noticed that the intensive courses had been added to Portal, much later than initially communicated. This raised questions among the student body about the reasons behind the delayed decision since first years were left in the dark about their intensives until many weeks into their first semester.
One of these students, Willemijn Eijsink, a first-year Sciences major, recalls constantly checking Portal towards the end of September for any updates on the intensives, seeing that the intensives were not going to be uploaded in time. This started to “get annoying”.
Eijsink admits that she was not expecting AUC to be on time in regard to uploading the final decisions on courses for the intensive period. “There have been some inconsistencies with communication,” she says, recalling how first-years experienced similar delays when it came to submitting course preferences for their first semester.
Janey Niemeijer, former Head of AUC’s Admissions and Registrar department, admits that there is no short answer for why information on intensives was delayed this year. “First-years’ course registration had to be completely redesigned,” she says, indicating that there were multiple external factors contributing to the delay this year, such as AUC Next and its implications on the curriculum.
Niemeijer explains that curriculum changes, especially the abolishment of the language requirement, led to “the registration team having to do their planning very differently”. Furthermore, The Global Identity Experience, a course requirement for all first-years, had to be carefully planned in order to have a balance of students between the January and June intensive periods. This made course registration surrounding The Global Identity Experience course “a very intricate process”, Niemeijer says.
Overall, Portal and its system of course registration wasn’t equipped for the changes that came along with AUC Next and its effects on first-years’ intensive choices. Instead of having an automated course registration via Portal, for first-years, “everything had to be done manually”, Niemeijer says. This, alongside a recent change in the registrar position of the administration team, contributed to the delay of intensive course registration.
The Global Identity Experience, a mandatory course in the Academic Core during the first year at AUC, contributed to the heightened anticipation surrounding intensive course selections. In combination with the lack of Humanities alternatives for the January intensive courses, created anxiety surrounding the selection for students. “There was a lot of frustration particularly from Humanities students that the alternatives proposed were mainly languages and science courses,” Eijsink says, explaining how she and another student created a survey through which first-year students could indicate which intensive preferences they had selected, giving an overview of how popular certain intensives were going to be.
The first-year students were not informed at all about the delays in registering for the intensive courses. Eijsink says that sending an email about the updated time of course selection would have been an appropriate response from AUC, communicating “the fact that it [intensive course registration] was going to be late.”
Niemeijer agrees that “communication on behalf of AUC is something that should have been done”. Moving forward, she is looking into improving regular communication for students regarding course registration, while admitting that there is still a lot to improve when it comes to regular updates on course selection.
Despite this year’s delay, Eijsink says that she isn’t particularly worried about future course selections and their timeliness. However, she does recognise that similar issues will get more annoying as students advance in their studies at AUC. “When you’re trying to meet certain requirements for a Master’s course, the ‘not knowing’ becomes a lot more bothersome than it is as a first-year now”, she says.
The Herring 