April 17, 2025
We are in the middle of preregistration for the Fall 2025 semester. As far as I can tell, it's going well for CPSY. We have space in many of our introductory classes for first-year students, and our concentrators seem to be getting what they need. Rising seniors and juniors have started preregistering and rising sophomores will begin the preregistration process today at noon. Rising sophomores need to meet with their exploratory advisors to get a PIN number in order to preregister. This is fairly normal, and these students have been doing this since their first semester at Brown, so they know the drill.
Rising juniors, however, need to have an approved concentration declaration in order to preregister. This means that they have to submit their concentration declaration. Students are supposed to do this by a particular date, usually in March (for the 2024-25 calendar year, this was March 17, but it differs each year). You can check the handy Academic Calendar for Brown to find this out.
So, there's almost a month between rising juniors (i.e., students in semester 4 in the Spring semester) declaring their concentration and preregistration for the following semester. What's the delay? Why does this take so long? And why can't students declare their concentration whenever they want?
There are a few answers to this question. Concentration requirements can be complicated, and students often need to talk with an advisor to navigate them. Advisors don't have 24/7 meeting times. Although they usually set a few hours each week for this purpose, there are a lot of students and not as many advisors (in CPSY, we manage about 250+ students overall. There are eight advisors. You can do the math.
But there's another reason: ASK.
I tried writing a few drafts of this blog entry. Each time it felt like all I was doing was ragging on ASK. And yeah, some of this is going to sound like that. So, I need to start with some historical perspective: ASK is better than the previous systems, going all the way back to paper declarations (yeah, I'm old). ASK is definitely better.
But, that doesn't mean it's not really confusing. Or, to not use double negatives: ASK is really confusing. It's hard to navigate, and because it's kludged together through a series of modifications over the years, it can be buggy. We try to fix these (well, there's a guy in the DoC office who actually does the programming) as quickly as possible. But it can be frustrating.
Instead of listing out all of the frustrations, I will just mention one, and it's solely on the faculty side - students don't know about this. As the DUS (Director of Undergraduate Studies), one of my responsibility is to assign new concentrators in the department to advisors. I do this by concentration (i.e., advisors only work with students in one concentration, so there are different advisors for Psychology, Cognitive Science, etc.). I also try to balance the workload (that's not always possible, and there are some issues there).
But I don't get a notification every time a new student declares (otherwise, I would have like 200+ more emails in my inbox). Rather, these declarations are binned, and I get an email once a week (for some reason on Sundays). There isn't a setting here - there's no way for me to control this. It's just a function of the system.
So, this is one of the many reasons why you should declare your concentration on time (before that date in March) is that it can take almost a week just to assign you to an advisor. If you, for example, declare on a Monday, I won't know until the following Sunday. And only then will I assign you to an advisor. Then that advisor has to look over your concentration and usually meet with you or talk with you in some way. It's a process.
And before you ask - it's not easy to check this daily. The email that I get is the way I can access this part of the system. This is a limit of the system.
So, the onus is on students to submit their declarations in a timely manner. After all, we (your faculty) don't know what you want to concentrate in, or how you want to fulfill those concentration requirements.
There's one other thing: Students also need to know that faculty (your advisors) don't get an email when you submit a revision to your concentration. We have to check this manually, and it's nontrivial to do so (it requires a lot of search). So, if you get asked for revisions for your concentration declaration, it's a good idea to email your advisor to tell them that you have submitted the revisions. It does make the process a lot smoother. It's why I like meeting with my advisees in person - that way, they can do it in front of me, and I can approve them in person. Doing it asynchronously has this long delay built in.