Column by Connor Jaschen, Features Editor
Now that everyone has (hopefully) scheduled, it’s time to point out something that affected a large portion of the student body this week: those myGate crashes.
It happens every year. Last year, freshman me decided to be on time and do everything I could to make sure I had all the classes I want. I got on, and what happened?
The whole site froze up and kept me away from that ‘sigh-of-relief” moment when you look at your schedule and realize you got every class you had planned. Luckily, I was just a freshman and had enough gen ed courses I needed to take before I got into the nitty gritty of my major. Sadly, not everyone can count themselves so lucky.
You would think that since the university has consolidated most of student online activities to one or two sites (myGate and Canvas) that it would also make sure it had the ability to hold the online traffic.
Obviously that is not the case.
The traffic on the server was hectic, I’m sure, but if the university wants to assign only two separate times to schedule for the next semester, they should also find a way for the servers to handle that sort of traffic. Instead students were constantly being kicked off from the site, keeping us from making sure we have the right classes to graduate.
I haven’t spoken to someone yet who didn’t go through some sort of meltdown over the chaos that is scheduling.
You stay up the night before to plan out the best possible schedule, you wake up early enough to rub the grogginess from your eyes and as soon as you get the chance to nab that last spot in your upper-level course, you’re kicked off the server.
And that is when the rage sets in and you consider the ramifications of punching someone in the throat.
Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but still. If scheduling is laid out so large portions of the student body are supposed to get on all at once, Murray State should have some way of making up for a server that obviously isn’t meant for that heavy of a flow of activity. Honestly whatever it takes would probably be worth it. I can only imagine what it would be like to be locked out of one of the final classes of your major say junior or senior year.
Yeah, I get it, I’m not a techno-geek, so I don’t even really know how someone would accomplish that, or if it’s even possible.
But if the other option is kicking someone off of the one website they can actually use to schedule, something should be done about it.
Is asking for a stable online experience too much?