By Pedro Santos / Staff Writer

April is considered to be the last month of the spring semester since May only has time for the finals. When it comes to this part of the semester, students are worried about increasing their grades or just keeping them if they have done well through the classes.

Another thing that certainly disturbs the students’ sleep, is choosing what classes they should include on their schedule next year. And the Valley staff is always looking forward to finding options that must make the students’ and advisors’ life easier. So the Office of Information and Technology came up with a new registration program that brings more features than the one the Valley is currently using. 

Missouri Valley College is supposed to have it in the spring semester of 2023, and the staff started working on it 6 months ago. Omar Al Rafae, Principal Software Engineer, explained what motivated them to work on this new system.

“It is not just for registration, this system is for everything, so basically it will be for registration, online payments, scholarship financial aid, transcripts. It includes everything that the student does on campus,” he said. “Also for talking to faculty, attendance, grading. The goal is to replace not only the student web services that you see on the Valley website, but also the way students log in when you go to the student web services or the library that the password is a different one, this system will have a single login”.

Beth Mccrary, Career Planner, who assists some freshman students that are currently in ESL said she is looking forward to the change as the current system can be difficult to use.

“This system has lots of bugs and sometimes it is hard to work with it, so I am totally in favor of this new system,” said said. “I do not have a lot of information about it, but I’m sure that the change will be better.”. 

Al Rafae said all the staff will have training sessions to get used to it before implementing this new system.

Students will also be able to make a four-year plan using filters for the major they intend to conclude, not being so necessary to do some research in the college catalog. Henry Neudine, a freshman student, is also looking forward to the change.

“I wish we had this system already,” he said. “In my freshman year, the professors advised us that is really important to have a four-year plan if you want to graduate as soon as possible. The only bad thing is that we have to go through a whole catalog and I am not sure yet about what major what makes things more complicated.”