Sometimes a question from a stranger says a lot about Wichita State.

“So you’re a student at Wichita State? You must be an aerospace engineering student,” said the man behind me in the queue at Dillons. “Why else would you come to Wichita?”

I was glad he did not justify his assumption based on my the stereotype associated with my ethnicity.

But he was quite right. Some of WSU’s educational programs, like aerospace engineering, are incomparable to programs offered by other universities.

While WSU offers several classes and sometimes allows students to choose what classes to take at what time, some WSU classes are semester specific.

This means that these classes are offered either in the spring or fall semesters, but not in both.

A lot of the courses are laid out in a manner that makes this transition smooth from semester to semester, provided the students consistently pass their classes as they take them.

This might not be the case for all students.

For example, aerospace majors are required to take Flight Structures in the first semester of their junior year. But this class is exclusively offered in the fall semester.

This means that students who enroll as freshmen in spring semesters need to take extra classes during the summer semesters during their freshman and sophomore years.

If they fail, they might have to wait a year for the next fall or spring semester to enroll for the classes.

“It’s very bad,” said Juan Alvarado, a sophomore student who enrolled in spring 2012. “It seems like the university has a logistics problem.”

However, due to the fact that classes are semester specific, they fill up incredibly fast, and registration for some of these classes close in a matter of days.

This is because these classes have not just students from two semesters trying to get into the classes, but students who were unable to enroll the previous years.

To make matters worse, some of the semester-specific classes offer only one section when the demand for the classes is simply overwhelming.

Advisers point this out to students, and students are expected to try to take multiple classes over the summers in order to catch up.

In the end, it is merely a rat race – a lose-lose situation for everyone.