Your Complete Guide to Course Registration At USC: How To Build a Schedule You Won’t Hate

By: Lanie Brice ‘24

The Spring Course Catalog went online Monday which means that even though it feels like the fall semester started yesterday, it’s already time to set your sights on the future and start puzzling out your schedule for spring. It can be incredibly intimidating to synthesize the vast number of general, major, and minor requirements, fit together class times like Jenga blocks, and wrap your head around the vast number of possible options that a school like USC presents to you. 

As someone obsessed with planning and spreadsheets, I’ve worked out a formula over my last year at USC for tackling registration season, so here’s my best advice for navigating your advising meetings, choosing your courses, and being prepared for when you have to log into WebReg to secure your dream schedule. 

Identify Your Advising Week

First off, it’s important to know when you should compile a draft of your schedule. Your advisor likely sent you an email alerting you of the launch of the spring catalog and detailing the steps that need to be taken before your advising appointment. If you missed that email, you can get all the information you need from your home school’s website like Thornton, Marshall, or Annenberg. Not sure where to find that? Simply type your home school’s name with “priority advisement Spring 2023” into your search engine of choice, and it should take you to the right website. 

The next step is figuring out how many credits you’ve earned so far so you know when your advising appointment will be and what day you’ll be registering. An easy way to figure this out is by heading to my.usc.edu, clicking the OASIS button, and then heading to your STARS report. From there, consult the chart on your school’s website to figure out when your advisement week begins. Don’t worry if this is too many steps, though. Your advisor will reach out to you when it’s time to schedule the appointment.

Write Down Everything You Might Want To Take

While you were likely handed an example course plan when you started at USC, chances are you’ve gone off script a few times like I have. Or, perhaps, you simply need to identify specific courses to fill the prescribed slots on your plan. I find the easiest way to approach building a schedule is to get all of the possibilities onto the page. Head over to WebReg, open the catalog, and allow yourself to browse through all of the categories you still need to complete for course titles that jump out at you. Browse around your major courses to see what your favorite professor is teaching next semester.

Write down everything that remotely piques your interest. Note the name, professor, days, and times to consult later and build up a bank of ideas without judgment or worry for how they’ll fit together. Find options for all of your remaining requirements. You can record these in a digital spreadsheet, on Notion, or just on a sheet of paper. However you choose to do it, though, I recommend organizing them by day of the week to make them easier to browse through later.

Find Your North Star

With so many options, it would be impossible to decide on a schedule without figuring out what’s most important to you. There will always be give and take when it comes to choosing classes, and it’s important to figure out what’s not negotiable. Do you only want to attend classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays or Mondays and Wednesdays because you commute? Do you loathe early morning lectures or evening classes and want to avoid them at all cost? Or is there a course that’s been on your bucket list that you’ll do anything to fit into your schedule? Find the middle piece of your puzzle and let it inform your choices from there.

Give Yourself Options (And Have Back-Ups)

As you start drafting schedule options, make sure you try out a few different configurations. You can make sample schedules that gravitate towards opposite days, cover different requirements, or mix and match classes you’re excited about with the ones you’ll just have to get through. Reflect on which schedules you’re most drawn to and why. Just know that your first idea may need a little editing with time. 

Also, as you start moving the pieces around, make note of classes you’re considering that are at the same time as the classes you’re ultimately choosing. These make easy substitutions if the class you’re hoping for fills up before you’re able to enroll. This is particularly important for freshman and sophomores who unfortunately get the last registration time slots. The goal is to be able to quickly pivot on an already stressful registration day so all your hard work doesn’t unravel if one class doesn’t work out. 

Be Honest With Yourself

Plenty of us would love to be morning people. Or we’d like to think of ourselves as someone who could handle an 8:30AM class. But there’s a big difference between being awake at 8:30AM and being in a lecture hall ready to learn. I speak from personal experience in saying that I’ve made revisions to my schedule after giving myself a hard look in the mirror, both with classes that were too early and too late. It doesn’t matter how good the class is in theory if you can never force yourself to attend, so try to consider your personal limits (while still staying flexible) when deciding your fate for the next year.

There’s Always Time to Change It

I have yet to start a semester, of which I’ve embarked on 3, where I haven’t changed my schedule multiple times before classes even start. Sometimes, I give things a second thought and come up with a better idea. Other times, I didn’t get a class I had my heart set on and checked back once a week leading up to the semester to see if there’s suddenly space. There’s always ways to modify and refine your schedule at a school as large as USC, so be open to the possibility that you might change your mind by the time we get to January. Hopefully, that can also be a comfort to take a little pressure off your first selections.

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