Alan's Carnegie Mellon Page

All about course registration

Note: Most of the applications referenced below can be accessed from http://www.cmu.edu/hub

Registration can be a little intimidating at first, so hopefully this will answer some of the questions you have. I've tried to break it down into steps. Note that, if you are an incoming Freshman, you can safely ignore all of this. Your registration will either have been done for you or will be done during orientation.

1. Figure out what classes you want to take the following semester. You can start throwing together intial schedules or just checking for initial conflicts (see Scheduleman, TCPulse, and Schedule of Classes below).
2. Talk to your advisor. This will likely involve a visit to their office to talk about where you are with respect to graduation and what your interests are and whatnot. You may need to visit other advisors to talk about your minor requirements as well. They will help you narrow down your choices and steer you away from making stupid class decisions.
3. Create schedules using one of the many assistance tools (see Scheduleman and TCPulse below). You can check availability of classes using CIO. It is probably in your best interest to create multiple schedules, especially if some of the classes you want are popular or above your class ranking (and hence, harder to get).
4. As your registration day approaches, you can use CIO to check waitlist status and make last minute changes that way.
5. When your registration time arrives (determined by your class and the last two digits of your student ID), use OLR to actually register the courses, up to your normal maximum unit load.
6. If you wish to overload beyond the normal load, your QPA must be above 3.0 cumilative. Return to OLR the Monday following registration, when your unit cap will have been automatically adjusted to allow for overloading.

Tools:
Academic Audit - This lets you check your current credits versus graduation requirements for your major. This is useful as an initial check as to what you should be taking.
Schedule of Classes - This should be one of your first stops to see a listing of courses and picking out things that pique your interest.
Scheduleman - A tool provided by the Tartan that lets you manipulate your schedule in real time and share it with others. Probably the most popular right now to use for preliminary schedulewanking.
TCPulse Scheduler - Another tool used for schedulewanking. This does not require you to register to be able to share schedules, but it usually does require you to basically have a schedule planned out beforehand. This is probably most useful if you simply want to display your schedule in a graphic form.
CIO - Course Information Online is useful for you to check waitlist statuses on courses, as well as seeing availability for you personally, taking class reservations into account. This should be used liberally to ensure you're not banking on a course that filled up days before your registration time.
FCEs - You can read previous faculty course evaluations here. It's not much use as far as finding courses goes (since you'll usually take courses based on what you need rather than on the professor teaching it), but it can help you make a decision to postpone the class another semester or so if the professor next semester sucks.
OLR - This is where you actually register your classes.