Registration season is here, which for many UF students means hours of stalking ISIS, consulting friends about courses and researching professors.
But this year, Paul Nickerson wants to make the schedule-selection process less painful.
The 24-year-old biochemistry junior created the Google Chrome extension ISIS Registration Helper.
It enables teachers’ names to be viewed next to the course information and provides direct links to their pages on www.ratemyprofessors.com, a website that shows opinions about professors and their classes.
“It’s sort of a minefield when you’re registering for classes,” Nickerson said, adding he wanted to make registration more convenient, so students can choose the teachers they want.
He included the www.ratemyprofessors.com feature because he said it offers a lot of student-based insight about UF professors.
Nickerson said it allows students to enroll in classes with some prior knowledge of what they’re getting into.
When ISIS Registration Helper users are on ISIS looking up a section, they can right-click, press “Add professor names,” and a column will appear with names and links.
Nickerson recently posted the extension on Reddit, and since then, he estimates about 200 people have downloaded it.
Nickerson said the extension is safe for users, and it cannot track their information.
The source code is provided on his instructional web page.
Programming is one of his hobbies, and it only took him about seven or eight hours to create the extension, he said.
“I’ve been programming for years and years, so it’s not too complex,” he said. “It’s just figuring out how the pieces fit together.”
Jackie Lopez, a 20-year-old French junior, said students often get frustrated with ISIS during registration time because they are trying to get the best professors.
Finding them sometimes involves too much research, she said.
Lopez said she rarely spends time on ISIS during the semester, but during registration, she uses it at least twice a day.
Lopez said she does not want to end up dropping a class because she did not get her preferred professor.
“All I want to do is get my schedule,” she said.
But biology junior Corinne Fuchs, 20, said she does not mind the time it takes to coordinate her professors and course information.
“I’m technically inclined, so it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “All [the extension] does is eliminate one step.”
Fuchs said it is difficult to get the correct combination of classes for a semester.
She said multiple tabs on ISIS would make registration easier.
As for Nickerson’s extension, UF spokesman Steve Orlando said anything that helps students choose a course can be beneficial to them.
However, the official faculty evaluations students complete at the end of every semester provide information that’s probably more concrete and usable, he said.
“If I were a student looking at some of those ‘rate my professors’ entries,” Orlando said, “I think I would probably take it with a little bit of a grain of salt.”
The extension can be found at www.goo.gl/mIqsf.
