A number of recent technology glitches have students worried about registering for January and spring classes, with registration beginning Monday morning.
A major concern for students is the University’s Wi-Fi and the possibility that it might not be able to handle the overload of students trying to claim classes.
“When not that many people are using [the Wi-Fi] it runs OK at best,” said Edwin Escobar, a computer science major. “As more people go on, it can cause problems with the web browser. Even if people try to register, it may not save your information.”
The Office of Information Technology has been working to remedy this issue. OIT is working on installing a new Wi-Fi technology that will make it easier for students to stay connected and at higher bandwidths, which could make registration less painful.
“I think like with any website there’s always a demand,” said Todd Britton, Assistant Vice President of Information Technology.
“It’s not going to crash, but there may be a wait.”
Britton said the registrar’s office tends to stagger the number of students registering at one time so that there are never 2,000 students registering at once.
This new Wi-Fi is scheduled to be in every building on the main campus by April 2016.
Britton urges students to seek help from OIT if they require assistance.
“We can’t help if we don’t know,” Britton said. “We want to know and we want to fix.”
The Wilson Library has also suffered from its own technical glitches.
Computers at Wilson Library have been shutting down recently.
A possible explanation for this is a pair of power outages that occurred in the building, librarian Vinaya Tripuraneni said.
“When students report issues we handle them as quickly as we can,” she said. “We do monitor the desktops every morning as part of our opening procedures.”
—Des Delgadillo
