In the perfect college, students should be able to access the right information from their teachers or go online and not feel helpless when needing to do something, especially something as simple as withdrawing from a class. In that ideal utopian institution, there would not be long lines at the campus during withdrawal deadlines or people crashing the CUNYFirst servers because there are too many people at once dropping course. Sad to say that we don’t attend that perfect college but that doesn’t mean that improvements could not be made to help students know all there is to know about dropping courses.
The purpose of this is to end any confusion regarding how to drop the classes. Many students in City Tech are not told what to do when they’re failing a class or feel that they have too much of a workload or financial burden to continue with one class. They’re told to drop the class via CUNYFirst or speak to an advisor but more often than not, they’re not told how to do it, leaving those who need the information confused and extremely desperate as to what they want to do.
There is much for these students to be concerned about, as there are withdrawal dates and dropping past each of these deadlines carry different ramifications when it comes to financial aid or grades. Students get desperate and often have to seek help from other students who themselves may be ill informed about the process.
One major resource that was looked into early on was a pdf that was provided by the Kingsborough Community College that gave a simple step by step instruction on withdrawing courses from the CUNYFirst website. Another resource that was used was the Program Change Form that is given to students visiting the Office of the Registrar. This particular document was for students who are wanting to drop their courses and have spoken already with an Academic Advisor and a Financial Aid Counselor to determine the repercussions on one’s financial aid. Besides CUNYFirst, this is the only other means still used by City Tech in dropping classes.
The sources that had been gathered in the following weeks have made the members of the group realize that there were so many different ways to drop a course, either by finding out online or by looking through papers provided by the college. No wonder so many students in City Tech have absolutely no clue what they should do! One way instructs you to go to the faculty advisor and filling out a form so the classes can be dropped! Another is via the CUNYFirst website and some students are seriously mistaken in thinking that ESims is still being used. The staff is not blameless and more than a few were judged to be just as clueless about the right way on how to drop courses. CUNYFirst also is useless for first time users and in the end, it was decided that there was a need for a new resource tool with up-to-date information on class withdrawal.
There needed to be a website that all students could access anywhere, either on campus or at their home, that would fill the void left by ill informed students and incompetent staff members, in case that they would end up in a situation when they have to drop a class. As this is a problem faced by students, it would be best for the problem to be tackled by other City Tech students who are more familiar with the process of dropping classes. It would be a website that offered simple, easy to follow instructions. The final result of the weeks of gathering sources and instruction was the creation of this OpenLab site.
How to Drop a Class in City Tech is a brand new resource on OpenLab for those enrolled in City need information on dropping a course as well as a guide in dropping it either by speaking to your faculty advisor to change your program or via the more popular option, CUNYFirst. Even though CUNYFirst has been around for a while in City Tech, not many people are comfortable in using it, especially when the withdrawl deadline is drawing near and they need to know how to do it as soon as possible.
