FM Imagines: The Brand New Digital Blues

It was a nightmare.

After searching for classes on the redesigned my.harvard for nearly 30 minutes, I’d only managed to find one potential class, a new Gen Ed that revolved entirely around eating chalk.

Needless to say, I was bemused and brimming with questions. For example: Is a class in which 40 percent of the grade is determined by how much chalk you can eat, and the other 60 percent is determined by how little chalk you subsequently regurgitate, really fulfilling the guidelines of the General Education system?

And, more importantly: Would the TFs be any good?

Issues like these have plagued the relaunch of my.harvard. Students have experienced every possible mishap, from being unable to successfully request permission from a professor to take a course, to temporarily going blind after opening the syllabus for that one voodoo class that no one can remember actually having taken.

Everywhere the students are in an uproar. How, they seem to be asking, is it possible that Harvard managed to screw this up when CS50 is so big that they’re thinking of renaming Widener in its honor and then just dumping all the books out somewhere?

Like a grandparent that you were pretty sure wasn’t that racist, the more time you spend with the new my.harvard, the more its flaws become apparent.

For instance, were you aware that clicking the financial services tab sends you to meatspin.com roughly half the time? Though admittedly it’s a design flaw in keeping with Harvard’s longstanding commitment to making poor people feel uncomfortable, this poor person can’t help but feel it’s a tad unbecoming.

Other users, my dear friends among them, have reported trying to schedule appointments with UHS only to end up accidentally voting in the UC election.

Which is something that should really, truly never happen.

Unfortunately—and this is really the icing on top, the gross, pitted, worm-eaten Maraschino cherry besmirching the resplendent fondant—the new my.harvard is so hellaciously bad that, like a computer program in some poorly written thriller, it’s begun to infect operations outside the Harvard administration. The Spee Club has gotten a lot of great press in the past few days for deciding to punch women, but this new gambit becomes a lot less exciting when you consider it was a complete accident.

They were just trying to sign up for that class where you eat chalk, and the new my.harvard got a little carried away.