Attention all MA English Lit students: spring 2023 registration is now active as of 11/2. When you go to register for courses, be careful to search for the English schedule, and not the English Grad Ed schedule. If you start typing “English” in Connect you’ll be prompted for one or the other, and you might naturally click on the one with “Grad” in the title, but this is not the schedule for us. That schedule is for students in the Master of Science in English Education which is a different program from ours, involving totally different faculty and actually run out of a different school at the college (it’s not in the School of Liberal Arts, as we are). You’ll know you’ve reached the proper schedule if you can see the level 500+ courses listed in the previous blog post.

Also, as some of you may have noticed, there’s a new tool available to students this fall, something called a “registration planner,” which unfortunately will not reveal the accurate titles for all of our courses. For example ENGL 540 up in Connect is titled Philosophy of Literature on the schedule, but in the registration planner it shows a title of Special Topics in British Lit. This will happen for courses numbered 514, 515, 540, and 560, because these are what are known (behind the scenes) as topics course numbers, meaning they are numbers that we can use to run all sorts of new or different courses. These four course numbers each have a generic title, in the system, that we use as placeholders until we actually plug something into the schedule using those numbers. So for another example, ENGL 560 has a generic title of Special Topics in American Literature, but in the spring scheduled its title is Black Theatre, Art, and Power in the Digital Age. What’s happening here is that students weren’t actually meant to see those generic titles, and you won’t see them in Connect; you will instead see the custom titles. Apparently the new planner tool is set up in a way where it’s drawing the generic titles out of the registrar’s system, without recognizing that they’ve been assigned custom titles in Connect. This is all a bit convoluted I know but, if you’re looking in the registration planner and are confused by what you’re seeing, this is why. Fortunately this should make no difference in terms of actually registering for courses in Connect.

If anyone has any questions about any of this, please contact me at cloots@mercy.edu. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to grab seats in preferred spring courses right away, before they fill up!