Between midterms and preparing for those dreaded finals,
students have one last task to tackle ““ picking classes for
Winter Quarter.
With so many major requirements, extracurricular activities and
part time jobs, choosing which classes to take ““ and when to
take them ““ is no easy feat.
The class planner feature on the MyUCLA Web site, the portal
that connects users to many services, can aid students in picking a
fitting schedule.
Though easy to use, the class planner may not be the most
effective tool for generating schedules that work with a
student’s specific preferences for class times.
But now, UCLA students have the advantage of accessing a fairly
new online tool ““ the Satyanash Scheduler.
Anish Shah, an alumnus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
New York, created the program as an alternative to
Rensselaer’s own class planner feature in 2001.
Unlike the program on MyUCLA, where students have to pick out
each class time, Shah’s scheduler only requires students to
specify what classes they want to take and what times they
don’t want class.
Based on the criteria entered, the scheduler generates all
possible schedules that fit the student’s preferences.
At Shah’s school of less than 5,000 undergraduates, the
Web site proved to be an immediate success.
“After two and a half weeks, there were 10,000 hits on the
Web site,” Shah said.
Though he said the site “makes the registration process
easier,” Shah does not anticipate his scheduler to grow
quickly among campuses.
“Most expansion has been because I have pushed it … not
a lot of outside interest,” Shah said.
The Web site is currently run at five schools, managed mostly by
Shah’s family members and cousins.
Because it is an open source program, meaning its code is
accessible to the public, anyone who wants to improve the scheduler
is more than welcome to do so, Shah added.
Though the Web site is not officially endorsed by UCLA, students
have the option of using it as an alternative to the class planner
on MyUCLA.
The scheduler became available at UCLA last fall, when Shah
helped his cousin Kaanan Shah, a second-year biology student, set
it up.
“If there is an error in the program, I go and update it.
It’s one of those things that takes care of itself,”
said Kaanan, who manages the UCLA version of the program.
Though she said it would be nice if MyUCLA adopts this program,
or its features, Kaanan is unsure if it will happen.
“(At) other schools it hasn’t happened,” she
said.
Students seem to be extremely content with the student-run
service.
Having shortcut links to major requirements, general education
requirements and an appealing visual appearance are a few of the
reasons why Jisun Kim, a second-year undeclared student, has been
using the scheduler for a year now.
“I’ve made a really good schedule for this quarter
““ it’s wonderful,” Kim said.
The scheduler can also sort potential schedules by the amount of
time preferred between classes and which professor the student
prefers.
As the scheduler expands, the developers hope to add some new
and useful features, such as being able to save and print a desired
schedule, said Shah.
The scheduler can be accessed through
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~kshah1.