A privilege rarely exercised at Brandeis has been its students’ ability to enroll in classes offered outside of the university’s own course catalog. I am, of course, talking about the cross-registration program Brandeis shares with a number of other schools peppering the immediate area (Tufts, BU, Wellesley, Bentley, etc.), more formally known as the Greater Boston Consortium.

The few people I have known who have cross registered have predominantly done so to fulfill requirements for specific pre-professional tracks that this school’s students don’t traditionally go for, such as a specialized type of pre-health, pre-law, engineering, etc. The other two individuals have done so to mend scheduling conflicts they’d otherwise have regarding classes they’d need to fulfill major requirements.

This semester, I happen to fall within the former group: a guy taking an anatomy class at Boston University in the name of satisfying an anatomy lab requirement in the pre-pharmacy track. I wasn’t too sure what BU would be like after spending three years exclusively studying at Brandeis—making regular trips deep into the city of Boston, stumbling around BU’s supposedly enormous campus, interacting again with people who have no connections with me or anyone I know, sometimes eating at places other than Sherman or Usdan. Given my milquetoast, suburban American background, this struck me as quite the adventure. It has been around two months since I first set foot on the terra nova that is another similarly priced, greater Bostonian college campus located around 10 miles from where I’m sitting right now, yet in my head lingers one particular salient issue from the very beginning of the endeavor that never really resolved itself.

This issue, it so happens, is that the whole cross-registration process just doesn’t seem all that refined. There simply isn’t any standardized method by which people can cross register; each school has their own individual forms, requirements and requests for personal information. As you might imagine, the ensuing cross-college interaction can result in some pretty confusing discourse. Overall, my advisors seemed a little unsure of a number of things BU was asking of me and who I ought to find, exactly, to fill out a number of signature boxes on BU’s cross-registration form.

Another thing that bothered me was the fact that I had to get four physical signatures (one each from Brandeis and BU’s registrars, respectively, one from an “Advisor or Dean,” and one from the course instructor) on paper. Consequently, I tried the method of sending the file to one of the four, having that person print the form out, physically provide a signature, scan the form again, send the file to me, and then prompt me to send the file to the next person in line. This might just be a contentious opinion of mine, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a better, less tedious way to do this. Is it not okay for someone to just scan their signature, then copy and paste it into official documents? To sign off on things using the brush tool in Microsoft Paint? In any case, the course instructor herself ended up not giving me a signature until I physically met with her the day classes at BU started, a day before the form was due. I may as well have just walked and saved everyone else the bother.

However, something I rather appreciated when I realized a course conflict involving the anatomy class I’d originally signed up for at another institution, before I had to switch to BU, was permission from the registrar to manually alter the cross-registration form they’d provided me with the new information. I’m not being facetious here. Although it is an onerous task to identify written sarcasm, that was, in my opinion, a genuinely good call on behalf of championing efficiency over blind bureaucracy.

But generally, the process of actually enrolling in the class was a pain, given the underdeveloped infrastructure of the Greater Boston Consortium, or at least that which is shared between Brandeis and Boston University. Aside from that, I have to say I’ve had a grand old time seeing new people, exploring the school’s sprawling campus and identifying more similarities to Brandeis than I’d anticipated. But I’ll get into that next week.