When I came back to my dorm after winter break, I had mentioned to my family how excited I was to see people on campus again and that I was looking forward to getting to know my new professors. What I didn’t realize was that I would be seeing a lot of people on campus and meeting with multiple offices that week because I was dropped from all of my college classes three days into the semester due to a registration error. Since I write a lot about the importance of self-advocacy skills on my website, here is a narrative on how I handled being dropped from all of my college classes, which included re-registering for everything and getting locked out of numerous things along the way.
Believe it or not, I had the perfect schedule
Prior to starting the new semester, I enrolled in all of my classes and had what I called the perfect schedule. All of my classes started at a reasonable time in easy-to-access buildings, and I had already told several of my professors about my visual impairment and Disability Services file I had with the university. I attended my first two days of classes and met all of my professors. I thought to myself how great everything was… and then I went to my Thursday class.
Related links
- College Scheduling Hacks For Students With Chronic Illness
- How To Schedule College Classes
- How To Explain Disability Accommodations To Professors
- Tips For Taking Online Classes As An On-Campus Student
- Managing Chronic Migraines in College
- How To Create A Disability Services File
How I noticed I was dropped from all of my college classes
I was sitting in one of my data science classes on a Thursday when I noticed I couldn’t access the course website. The website was not showing up in my student profile, and a lot of functions were locked— I figured it was some sort of accessibility issue or Blackboard glitch. The teaching assistant came to look at my computer, and we discovered that I had been force-dropped from all of my classes around midnight the night before. I was understandably surprised, so I went to the professor who had been at the university for years and asked for their advice. They had never seen anything like this situation before, and helped me make a list of departments and people to contact so that I could get this resolved. I had five days before the add/drop deadline passed, so I would need to act quickly.
Related links
- Computer Lab Accommodations For Low Vision Students
- How To Explain Disability Accommodations To Professors
- Campus Addresses Every Student Should Know: College O&M
- What To Know About College Assistive Technology Specialists
- How I Use Blackboard With Low Vision
My first five phone calls
Even though I had been technically dropped from the class I was sitting in, I continued listening to the lecture and then started making phone calls once class ended, making stops at different offices as I walked to the dining hall. Per my professor’s advice, my first five phone calls were to the following people:
- Student Support Center to figure out if there was a glitch in my academic standing— not the case
- Office of Student Conduct to check and make sure I wasn’t suspended or expelled by mistake— thankfully I was not
- Office of Financial Aid to ensure there were no holds on my record, and they confirmed over the phone that there were none
- The Registrar, who told me to drop what I was doing and come in immediately
- My mom, to brief her on the situation
I made a couple of in-person visits to other offices in the meantime that I thought might be able to help, none of which worked out. These included the office for my department, Disability Services, and the office of a favorite professor in another department to see if they had any other advice.
One of the things that helped me tremendously was being able to stay calm and not assign blame to anyone for what was going on. For example, instead of accusing the Office of Student Conduct of suspending me, I asked them to check my records to ensure a disciplinary hold was not put in place under my student ID number. This strategy helped a lot when I found out I also had a housing violation in the same week and had to deal with Student Conduct again.
Related links
Explaining the situation to my professors
I asked my Thursday professor to send me a list of emails for my other professors from the faculty directory, since I was temporarily locked out of my university email for an unrelated reason— needless to say, this was a very stressful week. After receiving the email addresses, each of my professors received a personalized version of this email while I was on hold during a phone call:
Subject line: Class Number Last Name First Name (student username) Urgent
Hello!
My name is NAME, and I am a student in your CDS 123 class that meets on DAYS at TIME. Due to a currently unknown glitch with my registration, I was dropped from all of my classes at midnight, and I also cannot access my university email address, which is typically EMAIL ADDRESS. This means that I do not have any access to course materials or homework, and I am actively working on re-enrolling in my classes. In the meantime, can you send any class information to this email address?
Thanks!
Signature
To help provide credibility for this situation, my Thursday professor offered to forward my emails to one of my professors who blocked external emails to ensure they received the message, which I was grateful for. My email was fixed a day or so later.
Related links
- Ten Templates For Emailing Professors
- How To Create Secure And Easy To Remember Passwords
- What If I Miss Assignments Or Classes In College?
- How I Organize Digital Files For My Classes
- How I Organize Emails In College With Low Vision
Visiting the Registrar
After sending the email to my professors while quickly eating lunch, I visited the Registrar to figure out what was going on. Since I had ruled out a lot of reasons why I could be unable to register for classes, I figured they would be able to help. After spending at least an hour in the office, we discovered that a form had been incorrectly filled out when I changed my major, and instead of keeping me from registering for classes in my old major, I suddenly couldn’t register for classes in any major. The Registrar was unable to correct this error, so I had to walk across campus to my former department to investigate further. A phone call was placed letting them know/giving them a warning that I was on my way to their office.
Related links
- How To Request a Course Substitution or Course Waiver In College
- Using GPS Apps On College Campuses: College O&M
- Ten Questions To Ask When Changing Your Major
A trip to my former department
As soon as I got to the office for my former department, I was sent to the main desk for the school of engineering. From there, I was able to explain the situation, and they confirmed that a form had been erroneously filled out when I was removed from my previous major. Instead of preventing me from registering from classes in my previous major, I was prevented from registering for classes in any major. I was told this would be fixed within the next day or so, and that while they would make every effort to help restore my schedule, they couldn’t make any promises. I wasn’t too worried about this as I had recently downloaded the perfect app that could help me restore my schedule.
Also, as soon as I got back from my trip to the former department, I locked myself out of my dorm. It was a very long day!
Related links
- Learning to Self-Advocate
- College Scheduling Hacks For Students With Chronic Illness
- What If I Lock Myself Out Of My Dorm?
- Creating Accessible Bulletin Boards For College Dorms
Monitoring class openings with Coursicle
Honestly, the main reason I was able to restore my schedule was because I had the Coursicle app downloaded on my phone and iPad, and notification sounds at maximum volume.
Coursicle is a college course scheduling app that makes it easier for students to register and plan for their classes. Students can plan their schedules and get notified when seats become available in closed or waitlisted classes, as well as browse the course catalog using filters to find information about class names, locations, professors, and more. For some schools, students can also get the names of textbooks for each class, which makes it easier to purchase books or request accessible textbooks in advance.
Coursicle is a free app available for iOS and Android. Users can pay for a $5 in-app purchase to track unlimited classes each semester, or they can refer the app to three friends and track unlimited courses for free. I paid $5 and re-registered for four classes within two days thanks to Coursicle.
Related links
- How I Use The Coursicle Class Scheduling App
- How To Schedule College Classes
- What To Know About College Assistive Technology Specialists
Meeting with my new department to see what they could do
Remember how I said I changed my major that semester? Well, this was quite the way to meet all of the new professors in my department, as many of them had heard about my bizarre situation at that point. I went to my new department the Monday after I discovered I had been dropped from all of my classes. During that time, my old department emailed me saying they could get me into one of my previous classes, but they were unable to get me into the other two classes I had in my schedule.
For one of the classes, the professor and I met with the undergraduate coordinator to see if the class could be transferred to a neighboring classroom that had ten more seats, since the waitlist for the class had eight students on it. Thankfully, this was an easy thing to do, and I was back in five of my classes before the end of the day. Which worked out well, because the next morning I was leaving for the ATIA Conference and it would also be the last day to add classes!
Related links
- Preferential Seating and Low Vision
- Disability and Classroom Accommodations For POTS
- How To Make Things On The Board Easier To See
- Attending The ATIA Conference With Low Vision
Like it never even happened
I constantly checked Coursicle and the student portal while in the airport, and paid for wifi on the plane so I could keep checking these apps, but nothing came through. Once I landed in Florida and checked into my hotel, I had pretty much accepted that I would not be able to get into my sixth class. But against all odds, I got a notification five minutes before midnight saying I could register for my sixth class. That meant that my schedule was now the same way it was on the first day of my classes, which was super awesome! But for the next three days, I tried not to think about anything college related and de-stressed from the chaos that had taken place in the last week or so— I was already caught up on homework and classes had been canceled due to snow.
Related links
- How A TSA Pre-Check Helps Me As A Visually Impaired Traveler
- Tips For Passing Time On Flights With Low Vision
- Airport Security and Low Vision
- Hotel Familiarization and Low Vision
- Walking In The Snow: College O&M
More tips for how to handle getting dropped from all college classes
- One option I considered for getting assignments and classwork while my email was unavailable was creating a shared folder with my professors— learn more in Implementing Shared Folders For Accessible Materials
- The reason why I was able to continuing doing my homework is because I had used several of the strategies mentioned in Tips To Stay Organized In Virtual Classes
- I wanted to keep my schedule as intact as possible since many of these professors were supportive of remote learning accommodations, which I write more about in Options For Attending College Classes Remotely
- Someone who is reading this might wonder if anything good happened to me that week— the answer is yes, I had just accepted an internship offer at Microsoft! I share more about preparing for an internship in Classes That Prepared Me For A Microsoft PM Internship
Published August 15, 2019. Updated January 2025