Woe is Telebears: 5 Tips for Surviving the System

Before every semester, some 22,000 undergraduates register for classes at Berkeley. Doing so while maintaining sanity, however, is another matter.

As a student with “sophomoron” standing, my registration appointment was yesterday. Current status: offically enrolled for 10 units and waitlisted for another 7 units, even for a class that I wasn’t sure I wanted to take. (The most popular classes have 0 available seats and a full waitlist.)

In scheduling Telebears appointments, priority goes to athletes and disabled students first, then seniors (they need to graduate!), freshmen (make their first semesters start on a happier note), juniors and sophomores.

Below are some tips for surviving the two-part Telebears:

1. Get your unit count up. This increases your academic standing, which in turn gives you an earlier appointment date. Take college-level classes in high school (and pass the exams), summer classes at a community college, seminars at Berkeley – when the time gets tough, the tough gets going.

2. Declare a major as soon as possible. Many classes will have course restrictions by category, which means that they reserve seating for students of a certain major; for example, reserving seats for Spanish majors for an upper-division Spanish class. Open seating for non-majors always fills up quickly.

3. Sign up for required classes during your Phase I appointment. Use schedule.berkeley.edu, and be sure to “Click here for current enrollment information” at the bottom of the course profile. Unless the professor has received harsh online ratings, core classes such as Economics 1 and English R1B will be full by the time your Phase II appointment rolls around. Save general interest courses and breadth classes for Phase II. It also helps to check enrollment for a class you’ll take in a future semester as a reference point for its phase-II-ability or lack thereof.

4. Email the professor if you’re on the waitlist. Anyone teaching a class is always glad to know that someone is genuinely interested in the course. As waitlists are manual by department, you might just receive an instructor approval code needed for exclusive entry. For classes with discussion sections, choose a relatively “open” discussion early in the morning or late in the day to improve your chances. Discussion usually determines attendance and enrollment more so than lecture.

5. Use your rabbit’s foot. You might get lucky. Once you have a certain academic standing and unit count, you just have to use the law of attraction and hope for the best appointment time.