Online Registration Debate - Nea

This summer, as most of ye will remember, we registered for the academic year 2007-2008 online. This was the first time that such a service was available to students of NUI Maynooth and what a service!! I mean no more trekking back and forward across that god forsaken bridge, no more queues and having to look decent for that student card picture that you know is going to be a disaster.

In June, when we got our results (what a wonderful day that was!), a little green sheet told us that we would be registering for the next year online using the student web services webpage looked after by a company called Its. That was all we heard of this registration thingy until the end of August when we got a letter telling us, and I quote “we at the student records office are ready to go live”. The letter said that we should keep checking the NUIM homepage as the guide will be listed in the “what’s new” section. I’ll admit that I only checked the website when the issue of fees came up and much to my surprise there was a link for a 22 page user guide that they recommended we print! eh Hello, no college means no free printing so they could forget it! I just did what any good engineer would do and saved it to my hard drive to view at my leisure.

When the blessed day arrived to register, I totally forgot about it (good oul student apathy) and didn’t register until the Friday before I was due back to college, but it only took about 10 minutes to become a second year student and also rob me of €893! I found the system to be totally easy to use and friends of mine felt the same. It pre – selected all of my compulsory modules straight away and allowed me to change all of my personal details. It also allowed us to view the module descriptors because we don’t get that huge NUIM calendar book for the year which means we save our backs from carting a 754 page book around, even though we only really need on average 8 pages from it, and we also save countless trees to produce this monstrosity which is excellent for the environment!!

Now I have heard that several people didn’t get a confirmation e-mail and that since they were told that they must get one, people started to worry but the kind people in the student records office had some one on the phone so the concerned student could check to see if they were registered. I have been told, but this is unconfirmed, that due to an upgrade with the Its e-mail system, many students did not receive the confirmation e-mail. The student records office also booked the PACR behind the computer centre and ran a sort of workshop to help students through the online registration process for one whole week. So if you felt that you were going to feck it up you could pop over to the workshop where the professionals would have guided you step – by – step process of online registration.

The online payment option when registering online is genius!! It means that you don’t have to make a trip to the bank to pay your fees you can just use a laser or credit card. But for those of you who don’t want to pay online or can’t pay online you can select a bank giro to be posted to you so you can go to the bank!

I felt that all in all the online registration system was a great benefit to all of us students as it saved a hell of a lot of time and meant that there was no need to go over that bridge!!