Registration week at Loyola is one of the most stressful times of the semester. As students advance in their programs, registration gets increasingly complicated. What used to be a simple click-and-register became a balancing act between fulfilling major requirements, finding open sections, and coordinating schedules around internships, jobs, and extracurriculars. For upperclassmen and double majors, one small glitch in the system can mess up an entire semester.
To Loyola’s credit, the university’s advising is deeply student-centered. Many advisors get to know their students over multiple semesters, understand their goals, and tailor their advice accordingly.
“A lot of advising is just kind of learning the students’ needs,” Lisa Collins Mass Communication advisor explained.
For students who are juggling multiple things, this individualized guidance is crucial. It ensures that advising isn’t just about ticking off boxes, it’s about understanding each student’s path and the many responsibilities that shape it.
But even the best advisors face limitations when the system they rely on isn’t keeping up. LORA, Loyola’s registration platform, is the source of many headaches. While it’s meant to make the process easy, it often does the exact opposite. Students and advisors see entirely different interfaces, creating miscommunication when faculty tell students to “check a section” or “look under a certain tab” that doesn’t exist on the student side.
As Collins put it, “I see something different than the student, and that’s a problem sometimes.” That disconnect on LORA is something that creates a multitude of issues which is not ideal, especially in a time-sensitive process like registration.
Technical issues only make things worse. Senior political science major Ella Jupiter described how, during this fall’s registration period, “the website was shut down for about thirty minutes. This was my eighth time registering for classes, and problems like this occur regularly.”
While brief system crashes might seem minor, when registration opens at 8:30 a.m. and hundreds of students are competing for limited spots, every minute counts. Students shouldn’t have to refresh their browser in panic, wondering if they’ll still get into the courses they need to graduate.
Even beyond technical problems, the structure of LORA makes long-term planning unnecessarily difficult. Students often have no way of knowing what classes will be offered beyond the upcoming semester.
Political Science and Honors advisor Sean Cain noted, “It is difficult for students to plan the next semester’s course schedule around a multi-semester plan to graduate without clear indications of what courses will be offered in future semesters.”
This uncertainty leaves students guessing, especially those who want to study abroad or graduate early. Being able to view tentative course offerings two semesters ahead would make an enormous difference. A clearer, more forward-looking registration system would empower students to plan with confidence and better manage their commitments.
Another major obstacle is the complexity of advising for students with multiple programs. Those with dual degrees, double majors, honors students, and those with minors frequently have more than one advisor. While this ensures that students receive specialized guidance in each discipline, it can also lead to confusion and miscommunication. One advisor may recommend a schedule that unintentionally conflicts with another department’s required class, and because the advisors often work within different schools or colleges, those conflicts can go unresolved. Streamlining communication between advisors and encouraging cross-department collaboration could make a huge difference.
Despite these frustrations, it’s important to recognize that Loyola already has a strong foundation of support for its students. The Student Success Center is one of the university’s most valuable resources, providing one-on-one academic advising, tutoring, and guidance for students navigating complex degree paths. Staff at the Success Center routinely step in to help students who face registration issues, ensuring that no one falls behind due to system errors or misunderstandings. Their efforts, along with those of faculty advisors, prove how committed Loyola is to setting students up for success.
Still, no matter how dedicated the people behind the system are, they can only do so much when the software itself becomes a barrier. LORA’s outdated design, its confusing terminology, and its limited future course visibility make an already stressful process even harder. If Loyola wants to reduce registration stress, the fix doesn’t lie in asking more from advisors, it lies in giving them better tools.
Registration should be a process that encourages excitement about the next semester, not dread. Loyola already has the people and programs that make advising exceptional, it’s time the technology caught up. With a few key improvements to LORA and better communication across advising teams, registration could become what it was always meant to be: a moment of planning, progress, and possibility, not panic.
