short stories / By Heidi Walters

Communication Dept.

(Jan. 31, 2008)  It would be easy at this moment in HSU’s history — surprisingly fat with increased enrollment as the spring semester freshly sprouts, but also in belt-tightening mode to cover a lingering deficit — to assume that any tales of overstuffed classes and enormous waiting lists has directly to do with this happy-sad situation. One might further accuse that it’s the administration’s fault for not foreseeing what would happen when it went all hyper this past year with its push to meet enrollment targets, HSU having lagged in enrollment long enough to fear the CSU honchos would yank away funding.

And maybe there’s some truth to that: HSU received 2,314 more applications by mid-January this year than a year ago, the increase mostly in freshmen applications. “Everything’s tight this semester,” said Bob Snyder, interim provost and vice president of student affairs.

But consider the case of class 309B, the most in-demand class at HSU, judging by its gargantuan waiting list. The class, “Gender and Communication,” taught by Assistant Prof. Maxwell Schnurer, is so popular that this semester its three sections are filled to capacity and about 120 more students are clamoring to get in, around 70 of them seniors looking to fulfill a final general education requirement in order to graduate this spring.

One of those seniors is Jen McCollom. (Double disclosure: This writer happens to be friends with McCollom, and Schnurer writes for this paper on occasion.) McCollom, an English major who transferred from College of the Redwoods a couple of semesters ago, blames the situation on poor communication.

“Last November, registration opened on Friday, the 16th, at 9 a.m.,” she said. “So at 9 a.m. I was registering [online].” She was able to get into all of the courses she needed, except for one: 309B. (She heard later it had filled up within the first six minutes.)

So at 10:17 a.m., McCollum emailed Schnurer. Ten days later, Schnurer e-mailed her back, saying the class was indeed full but that it was possible she could get into the class if someone dropped out; he’d put her on the waiting list. McCollum left it at that, figuring she’d probably get in.

“My experience at HSU has been, if I’m on a waiting list and I talk to the professor — and typically I’ve only had five people in front of me in other classes — and if I show up on the first day of class, I get in,” she said.

On the first day of classes this month, she arrived at 309B to discover the waiting list was not a mere five students ahead of her, but 30 ahead and almost a hundred behind. She says she wishes she’d known these odds last November; she’d have signed up for something else. But now her school and work schedules are fixed, making adjustments difficult. Besides, most of the other classes she could take to fulfill the requirement are now full.

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