Priority class registration opened at the University of Mississippi on Monday, April 13, marking the initial rollout of the university’s new platform, Experience.
In the first days of class registration, students found themselves embroiled in website errors and unresolved technical issues that left them feeling like lab rats testing a program not ready for launch.
In fact, the technology was so faulty that it disrupted adjacent systems; for instance, the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College was forced to postpone its senate elections due to the glitches hindering its ballots. GroupMe chats blew up with student after student asking who else was seeing the same error messages and how to get past them.
This frenzied class registration experience has left students wondering why the platform needed to be changed in the first place, and even more so, why now?
Jacob Batte, director of news and media relations at the university, said nearly 5,700 students registered in the new Experience system within the first two days of the fall 2026 registration period, which aligns with priority registration numbers in prior years.
“The university is aware that there have been students who have encountered items that may be impacting their ability to successfully complete registration,” Batte said. “We are actively implementing solutions and supporting our students every step of the way.”
Batte said the university stationed teams across campus before registration began to address unexpected items and help students navigate the transition.
Before the release of Experience, students and faculty used the myOleMiss platform to register for classes, pay the bursar, accept financial aid and manage all other logistics pertaining to the college experience.
myOleMiss, or as I like to call it, “Ol’ Reliable,” had been in use since 2008. Its interface was simple and relatively easy to navigate. The convenience of myOleMiss was the reason for its near 20-year tenure of usage by the student body.
The new platform, Experience, will serve the same purpose as myOleMiss once did. It is being implemented as the primary academic portal where class registration, financial aid and other tasks can be performed, and it is promised to be an upgraded and more “user-friendly” alternative to myOleMiss. The website is primed to fully replace myOleMiss by fall 2026.
Sophomore international studies major Ethan West from Hamilton, Miss., said that this would have been his fourth semester registering for classes through myOleMiss.
“The website is a little outdated, but once you got past that, it was pretty simple to use,” West said. “I didn’t think there was a problem.”
When the news of the upcoming transition to Experience began to resound throughout the campus, West said that he was “excited” about the opportunity for the website to be “modernized” to make registration easier.
“In reality, that did not happen,” West said.
Registering for classes, he said, left him annoyed and frustrated, a gripe he said was universal among his peers who also had priority registration.
“We were really just guinea pigs for all of these problems that nobody really could have expected,” West said.
After selecting his classes in Experience to register for them, West recounted receiving a slew of notifications about technical issues impeding his registration.
“(Experience) was saying that I had not taken prerequisites that I took years ago, and then for a little bit there it was only letting me register for intermediate college algebra,” West said, recalling a situation that he described as “intermediate algebra purgatory.”
The bugs of prerequisites not loading properly or the only available class being intermediate algebra should not have occurred. With the class registration date set months in advance, there should have been a greater effort to smooth out these issues ahead of time or to at least push the launch of Experience further into the future to allow for extra time to perfect the website and avoid unnecessary havoc.
Nevertheless, the production of the platform felt rushed and resulted in a troublesome experience for students trying to register for the fall, as West is just one of several students who struggled navigating Experience. Personally, I was met with numerous error codes and a crashed website when it was my turn to register for classes.
Carlos Harrison, a sophomore biological sciences major from Brandon, Miss., was “confused” about the decision to phase out myOleMiss.
“myOleMiss seemed pretty efficient,” Harrison said. “It had everything I needed, and I could see all the tabs right on the front page.”
In the switch from myOleMiss to Experience, Harrison found difficulty adjusting and preparing for class registration on the new platform.
“It’s pretty hard to move away from something that easy,” Harrison said.
The university did aim to assist students by sending various emails and tutorial guides for tackling Experience prior to the first day of registration. However, while appreciated, the endless emails and guides did not make many students’ class registration easier due to the unpredictable technological problems that occurred while attempting to use the site.
Harrison said a step-by-step slideshow explaining the process was made available to him by the university when he registered for classes, but it was overshadowed by the website’s issues.
“(The slideshow is) kind of useless when the website doesn’t work,” Harrison said.
Harrison believes, along with many students, that the university “definitely should have tested the website more extensively” beforehand.
Though it may have been time for myOleMiss to retire, the rollout of Experience did not have to be so chaotic. It is becoming increasingly clear that the transition was rushed, and there should have been greater preparation for unprecedented technical errors in order to lessen stress and frustration for students.
Perhaps in the future, more time will be taken to ensure university systems are complete and fully ready for launch before students are left to deal with them.
MacKenzie McDaries is a freshman Arabic and political science major from Murfreesboro, Tenn.
