Two weeks ago Friday, along with many of my fellow students, I went to Converse to pick up my registration packet. Upon opening the envelope, I was pleasantly surprised to find that all four of the classes I had preregistered for last spring were listed on my schedule, including those that had supposedly been capped. I then went about planning the rest of my activities, confident that I had my schedule set. I even went so far as to purchase my books early, in order to avoid the ridiculous lines which plague the bookstores during the first week of classes.

When I went to my classes last Tuesday and Wednesday, however, I got a very nasty surprise: simply being preregistered for a class evidently does not mean you are assured a spot in it for the semester. The College allows many more students to preregister than certain professers will permit in the class; in some cases, even twice as many as can actually fit are allowed to preregister. Not only that, but seniors who are not even preregistered in the class and who don't show up to the first meeting still often get priority over juniors, sophomores and freshmen-no matter what efforts they may have taken to secure a spot in the class. As a result, I didn't find out until Thursday that I, in fact, was only officially in two classes.

What is the point of the preregistration process if it doesn't guarantee anything and if you are just as likely to be ousted from the class whether or not you preregistered? And once you are kicked out of a class that you were preregistered for, where exactly does that leave you? You are very unlikely to get into any other class you may be interested in taking, since by the first or second day of classes they, too, fill up; not to mention the fact that if you are forced to shop for classes after being cut, you have already missed either one or two class sessions and are behind from the get-go.

There are several ways in which the system of preregistration could be amended to be more helpful. One solution is obvious: only allow as many people to preregister as there are spots in each class. I realize an argument against this is that not all students who preregister necessarily end up staying in a class after the first meeiting, but there will still be enough people shopping to fill any empty spots opened by those who drop out of preregistered classes.

Another way to make the process more fair would be to grant preference over all other-even seniors-to those people who took time in previous years. Although seniors should get the chance to take the classes they want before they leave Amherst, it is unfair that they should get to do so at the expense of underclassmen, whose entire schedules have to be altered at the last minute, possibly causing them to miss taking certain classes during their college career.

Isn't it the College's philosophy that students are individuals rather than nameless entities and that every student deserves individual attention and consideration? How, then, is it that students can just be thrown out of classes at the last moment and forced to frantically search for another? How is it that at a college whose main draw is that every student will get to study what he or she wants, one person can get kicked out of two of her classes and be left to fend for herself without any sort of guarantee that she will be able to take anything that is of interest to her?

I came to a small school so that I could be sure that I wouldn't just get lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately, I just did. I'm not sure that I still have such confidence in Amherst.