I recommend picking up a philosophy class with Dr Selinger if you've got a free elective hanging around.
PS the semester system is bullshit, quarters forever
I graduated right before the quarter-to-semester conversion happened, and heard more than my share of horror stories about lagging 10-week classes getting taught in 15, or worse, two 10-week classes smashed into a 20-week class, then taught in 15. Luckily, the writing was on the wall, so I ended up taking 32 course credits off-campus, and providing three years of pay stubs so that I could count part-time work as a co-op block, just so that I could graduate early.
Interestingly, I'd never heard of the telnet interface to course registration before today. I did hear about the modem bank - and being the one with the old laptop (2006 vintage), got to use the modem with the campus's 5-digit dialing to get a session on it. This was, by far, more performant than trying to use the Web interface that everybody else was hitting, but interestingly it also didn't have the silly "we're closed from 6pm to 6am" stipulation.
I was always impressed at how fast the older professors could fly through the Student Information System. Force adding you to a class could literally take a few seconds - faster that it took that clunky web frontend to load a single page sometimes.
Specifically, you'd connect to a cluster of VMS machines (some VAXes, some Alphas) which had a text interface to the (reputedly) off-campus mainframe which did registration. I recall that "vaxa" was usually the most crowded because it was always listed first, but if you got on one of the Alpha systems it was more responsive.
Everyone insisted that you MUST use telnet, not ssh (although ssh was enabled) because having hundreds of students logged onto each VAX was enough load already without introducing cryptography. If I remember right, you could get a list of who was logged in which indicated if they came in via telnet or SSH, and people did get shamed for using SSH.