Almost all juniors and seniors, as well as most of the sophomores at this school, are familiar on some level with the process of declaring a major or minor. First-year students have not had the displeasure of experiencing this yet, but they will soon. Students are required to declare at least one major by the end of their sophomore year.
Despite being a process that all students have to go through, the process is unnecessarily complicated. For those unfamiliar with this process, I’ll outline it briefly. Students must first print out a form that can be found somewhere on Brandeis’ website. Then, they must fill out the form with the classes that they plan to count toward the major requirements. Yes, that’s right. By sophomore year, students need to plan out at least part of their class schedule from then until graduation. After that, they must meet with and have the form signed by the department’s undergraduate advising head. Finally, they must drop the signed form off at the registrar’s office. The form also needs to have a student ID number written in the top right. This is the only thing that students will ever need to use this number for. So you don’t need to spend half of an hour searching for it like I did, I will tell you that this number can be found in the Student Profile tab on Workday.
This process is unnecessarily long and complicated. We live in the 21st century. Almost everything else that we need to do in order to graduate can be done online. We can register for a class with one click of a button. We can pay for tuition online. There is no reason that declaring a major should be any different.
Being able to declare a major online would make the process significantly easier and faster for students. Logging in through Workday or our Brandeis accounts would remove the need for us to find the Student ID number that we will never need again. It would make it possible for students to declare their major at whatever time works best for them, rather than waiting until one specific professor is available to meet with them. Digitizing the process would also prevent the possibility of papers getting lost, which would force students to redo the process completely. The form to declare a major is already available online. All that Brandeis would have to do is replace the print button with a submit button.
The changes that I outlined above are the easiest of the changes that Brandeis should make to this process. If they were to make only these changes, it would go a long way to making this process less stressful and less time-consuming for students. However, there are more changes that Brandeis should make to this process.
Students should not need to plan out which classes they intend to take three years in the future just to declare their major. It is impossible to know what classes will take three years in the future. Because the classes that you need to put down on the form are not necessarily the ones that you have to take, it is unnecessary for us to have to do it in the first place. For students that want to declare more than one major or a major and a minor, there should be an option to do that all at once rather than having to fill out the same form multiple times.
There are lots of things that are stressful at college. We just completed course registration. Finals are fast approaching. After that, there will be a short break before the new semester starts, bringing with it new professors and new courses. Soon, it will be housing registration, followed by midterms. Declaring a major should not be one of those things. If Brandeis wants to reduce the stress levels of their students, or at least their sophomores, modernizing the declaration system should be a priority.
