i registered for my last quarter of classes this morning. registration always brings back the same frustration: you wake up for the 6 a.m. opening, ready to grab the classes you want, and find that the seats are already gone. i’ve dealt with it too. you can plan your whole quarter around a course and still struggle to get in. it was much easier this time because I had priority, but it reminded me of the times in the past when i was struggling to get my classes, because i had come across an interesting fix for it.

in march 2025, i came across an article about students bidding for classes with an artificial currency at UATX. i immediately wanted something like it at uw.

i love markets. there’s something satisfying about using people’s choices to work out how to allocate a scarce resource. course registration seemed like a perfect place to try it. give students an equal budget of credits, then let them decide which classes deserve most of theirs. i could put more toward a course i cared about and accept having less to spend elsewhere.

i wanted to see whether uw would consider it. at 2:17 a.m., i sent an email to the university administration asking about bringing the idea here. i even offered to help build a prototype.

two days later, the university registrar, helen garrett, replied. she raised a concern about students abusing the system by trading or selling the credits. i followed up with a suggestion: make them personal and non-transferable, so each student could use only their own allocation.

she replied again. keeping such a system running would require staff, she explained. she also mentioned that there might be an opportunity for enterprising students to work with uw-it on ideas like this, and said she would get back to me.

the exchange stayed at that stage. i still like that i sent the email. i had found an idea that could help with a problem i faced, and i wanted to put it in front of someone who could act on it. i owe all the Ws i’ve taken through my life so far to his habit. seeing a better way to do something makes me want to find out how far i can take it. in this case, an article led to an email, which opened a conversation with the person responsible for registration at my university. sending that email gave the idea a chance to go somewhere. that’s the point of today’s post. if you have an idea, you should give it some fuel for it to go out into the world.

i’ll soon graduate, but thousands of students will keep waking up at 6 a.m. hoping to get their classes. i’d still love to see something like this exist.