My life would suck without CRS

February 13, 2010

12:00 AM

Thanks to startling breakthroughs in computer technology and an escalating sense of urgency among the administration peeps up there, UP life these days have become less hassle-free and more convenient than it was a few years back. This was the very concept I learned from my Econ 101. In the parlance of Economics (if my memory serves me right), there shall always be trade-offs between all things in life - in order for one to have more of something, one has to have less of something else. That's how nature works - or in the language of Obi Wan Kennobi (sorry for the misspelling), that's how the force is balanced. Sounds very pedantic yet it applies to almost all facets of life (and yes you get me right, even to your love life). Less hassle, more convenience. But that's besides the point. What I really want to talk about is the convenience that CRS brings to every UPian's table. For outsiders who don't even have the slightest idea of what a damn CRS is, let me enlighten you. CRS is a computer program of some sort (forgive me for my ugly choice of words) that lets UP students enroll on subjects of his choice during the enrollment period. You 're given a list of subjects that can be taken by virtually anyone (applies to GEs and electives) and you just have to enlist yourself on classes you are required to take and pray to God that you get the subjects you want on the first batch processing. By the time the third batch processing ends and you still don't have all the subjects you want/need to take for the current semester, that's the time when you fall back to earth and join the rest of us mortals to manually enlist like what most of our UP ancestors did during their stint in UP (that includes Manny Villar and Gibo Teodoro). Since the inception of CRS technology, class cards have been history. Gone are the days when we used to fill out those small white cards at the start of the semester and claim them during sembreaks to see our barely-passing grades. Gone are the days when we had to wake up 5 AM in the morning to save ourselves of our much-needed slots - only to find out we are at the mercy of the RVCs and the RAs. Yeah, good old times of long lines which never seem to end and bouts of heated confrontations among singits, matagal-nang-nakapila, and pinang-save-sa-pila.