First, I will start off by letting you all know that course registration at the University of Ghana-Legon sucks. Literally, registration sucks and will stress you out if you are an international student. Let me explain the process.
You have to jump through two hoops to successfully register for courses at Legon (most people just call the University of Ghana, Legon). The first hoop involves you going to the department where you want to take a course. For example, I am taking two linguistics courses. Before classes started, I had to walk to the Department of Linguistics in order to see what courses would be offered and their time and day. This means that if you’re taking courses in three or four different departments that you have to walk to each department to see the course listings. This is the first hoop and there are two big problems that come with it.
The most annoying one is when the department has not listed the courses for the semester. You leave your room and walk all the way to the other side of campus only to discover…nothing. Literally nothing because the course listings are not present. Now, there is no set date when all of the departments list their courses. However, one would assume that all departments would list them before classes start. Haha! Don’t play yourself. The first week of classes started and there were still some departments that did not have course listings.
The second problem is when the information on the course listings change and you have no idea. For example, I woke up early on this Tuesday morning to attend one of my linguistic courses only to discover that it had been moved from Tuesday 11:30am to Thursday 9:30am with no warning. I suddenly had a lot of free time in my schedule on Tuesday. Some of my friends have even run into situations where an entire course does not exist anymore. As in, they have to find a whole new course because the department made an error with their course listings. Between this problem and the first, I’m unsure which one has tired my legs more.
The second hoop involves their online course registration. Did I just type online? Yes, yes I did. You only go to the departments to see the courses and you register for your courses online. The only problem with the online system aside from the lack of course day and time, is the fact that some courses listed on the course listings are not online. For example, I wanted to register for a philosophy course that I saw on the course listings but when I went online I couldn’t find the course. This meant that either they were still updating the course listings online, the course was never meant to be on the course listings, or the professor decided to not teach the course anymore. This part of registration is far less physically demanding than the first part which I greatly appreciate. But then there’s the part of attending courses…
Courses here are simple. You meet once a week for two hours during the semester. Easy right? Except, during the first week there is this unwritten rule to not attend class. Professors don’t even show up. I’m not sure who came up with this rule or why it exists but it was a bit frustrating to walk to class only to find yourself as the only student or one of the few. The second week is over and more students showed up to courses. I think that by the third week going to class will be more of a regular thing.
I feel that this experience has made me appreciate my course registration process at Wellesley. I never knew that some students had to go through all of this work just to register for courses. I will admit that this process helped me get more acquainted with campus since I was often lost and had to ask for help. However, I would wish this stressful process on no one.
This weekend I’m planning on attending a church here for the first time which I’m surprisingly excited about. Next week, I will give you all the details about attending a Ghanaian church.
Until next time,
Su