Workday is great, and I love it. We all love it. Workday is the best!
From the moment courses slowly become available, with fun new changes every day as sections get changed or randomly deleted, I enter my thriving era. Cross listing the current offerings with what was offered last year to figure out whether they actually are having the class I definitely need to graduate, or if it’s just a holdover from last year, is the puzzle I crave every day. Who needs social media to provide routine dopamine when I can just figure out something new in Workday?
Speaking of using the course registration website as a social platform, Workday offers incredible opportunities for one-on-one connection with faculty and University staff. Need to get into a filled section? You’ll forge true bonds with administrators as you discover that the quality of your education is fully limited by the size of campus rooms. Whether you can take the class you’re dreaming of might depend on architectural plans from before female students were even allowed to matriculate on River Campus. But why build bigger spaces when you can place artificial restrictions on the academic ecosystem?
Why scroll through Instagram, when you can spend hours looking at all the classes you’ll never be able to take instead? Trust me. I’ve never taken anything that didn’t count towards a degree requirement, but if the opportunity ever arises, I am so ready. You can even look at the major reqs pages for majors you’ve never even considered, and derive a four-year plan. It isn’t maladaptive daydreaming if there’s a spreadsheet.
What more about spreadsheets? Workday offers the unique feature of modeling your class schedule. “Wow,” you think, “I’ll have so much free time!” Until you open up gcal and put in your five clubs and four jobs, the myth can persist and you can be happy. You are also greeted by colored banners reminding you of all the ways you’ve messed up selecting the checkboxes you meant to select, but for some reason no indications of having forgotten to select a grading basis will appear until registration is live.
Registration is my superbowl. I kid you not, I will wake up early just to walk to a deserted section of campus at 8 a.m. before anything else is open, just to make sure my wifi is speedy enough. I have sat in the little Lattimore courtyard in the dead of winter to ensure I got the lab sections I wanted (which I then switched out of two weeks into the semester). I count the time until I can finally click my little blue buttons. Workday is my sport and I am winning so goddamn hard.
