BraveWeb empowers students

By Tina L. Ray
Staff Writer

The registration process at UNCP has entered the 21st century.

Students are no longer required to fill out paper registration forms and take them to the registrar to sign up for courses. Now, all we have to do is meet with our adviser, get his or her authorization to take specific courses and to register for classes via the Internet using BraveWeb.

The ability to register online benefits the students of this university. We now have the responsibility to control our academic destiny. We must rise to the challenge of getting the classes we need in order to make graduation an attainable goal.

BraveWebmaster Gary Locklear said: “BraveWeb is a forefront runner for accessing your academic records.” He points out that the old registration process was not in real-time, in that when a student registers, he or she does not know whether a specific class is already closed or still open. The changes in the system allow students to know when they go online to register if a class is still available.

“With BraveWeb, it empowers you, it empowers the student to know when a class opens and exactly at what time,” Locklear said. “It is a student information system allowing each student to activate their personal academic information.”

Freshman Ashley Smith, a music education major, welcomes the chance to use online registration.

“The online registering was not as complicated as all the paperwork would be,” Smith said. “The hardest part was looking in the catalog to see the classes you needed.”

Some students criticize this new process because, as with any change, they may be fearful or slow to embrace it. A certain amount of courage is required to begin doing things in a different mode or to feel comfortable operating out of the realm of normalcy.

If life is an ever-changing phenomenon, then aren’t we as humans obligated to adapt to the probability of changes occurring?

Transforming registration from a paper process to an online process is a forward thinking progression that needed to take place. The UNCP community has come to respect developments made by this institution, especially moving us farther into the computer age.