Joanna Luter is not happy.

But the San Diego State senior is determined, she is armed with hard-won street savvy to help her dance past obstacles in the way of her prospective bachelor's degree and she is caffeinated.

For it's crash time.

Officially known as the opening of the fall semester, in the campus undergraduate underground it's known as prime time to crash their way into already-full classes they need or want but somehow didn't get.

"We go in like we belong, we sign in like we're part of the class, we do the reading, we do the work, we raise our hands and participate in class discussions and most times the professor will just let you in," Luter said over a nonfat hazelnut latte after her 8 a.m. class – the only one on her official schedule she plans to keep.

Luter had whipped out her zebra-striped cell phone and summoned her friends over to the campus Starbucks to compare crashing notes, as the late Hank Williams Sr. sang his heart out on the cafe stereo.

Of the 10 students she has gathered, only one had never crashed a class in five years at SDSU.

"In my day, we never crashed classes, we didn't have to," said professor Edward Kelly, who was graduated from the private Notre Dame University in the 50s. Yet Kelly didn't hold that generational difference against the handful of crashers who showed up for his advertising creative development class September 3, the first day of school. He even smiled encouragingly at crashing senior Bobby Bosch.

Bosch is grateful for his instructor's understanding, noting that "Some professors are real jerks about it, acting like they're too important to bother."

Class squeeze
Crashing is expected to be more widespread this year because the campus, the largest in California's 23-university system, has been overcrowded for the past five years even as officials have limited enrollment.
That physical squeeze is aggravated by the money crunch, with the CSU system absorbing a 13 percent, or $345 million, budget cut, a problem that has hit higher education in California and nationwide.

For San Diego State, the fall schedule offers about 6,000 classes to its record 34,000 students. Still, Ernie Griffin of Academic Affairs says, "We've tried to keep the cuts as far from the classroom as we can, but the fact is we're going to have less variety of classes, and bigger classes."

Junior Jake Rose desperately wants to graduate in four years. Yet, for three semesters, he has been unable to officially register or crash his way into a class on 16 mm film editing, the gateway course he needs before he can take any other classes as a film major.

"It's only one class for only 20 people, once a semester, and they let 30 more students every year get into the major. It's crazy," said the lanky film student, who does film work professionally as he tries to get a jump on his career.

Rose plans to crash the editing class again this week, and hopes for the best, but he knows he's not the only one planning to crash.

University's story
University officials say they are constantly trying to add more popular class sections to break such logjams. Yet sometimes those demands shift, like clothing fashions, leaving them stuck with the expense of classes that few students want.
"We monitor this every day, to try and keep up," said Bob Wilbur of the College of Business. "Four years ago, everyone wanted information decision systems and to be I-T (information technology) majors."

But when the dot.com bubble burst, many flooded back into safer career bets like accounting, he said, shooting demand for those classes up.

Even with the advent of computers simplifying the considerable paperwork of higher education, the problem remains: Students don't always get what they want.

The way it goes
At San Diego State today, students no longer have to wait in interminable lines to register.
Instead they can do everything by Internet; they can register for classes at their convenience, by appointment, even from a cyber cafe in Nepal.

Even so, there always are those who – like 2,000 returning students this year – did not register for any class. And nearly half of them are seniors, meaning they will be out there in the crash zone with the rest of the competition.

"We're absolutely mystified as to why that happens, but it still happens," said Griffin of Academic Affairs.

Officially, San Diego State administrators say only about 10 percent of their 27,000 undergraduates crash during the first weeks of class, known as the "add-drop period," which is the free zone when students can switch classes with no financial penalties.

That official statistic brings snorts from 19-year-old Deadra Amos as she and roommate Jen Peterson head out to the hallway to wail in peace after being evicted from a sociology class they tried to crash.

"Ten percent? Yeah right. On what planet?" hooted Amos, who needs sociology for her hospitality and tourism major.

Senior Rashad Johnson found it harder to shrug off his failure to crash the same class. He wants to graduate in 4½ years, and he really needed that sociology class, now.

Unlike many crashers who say they choose classes for the times they're offered or for the unit requirements they fulfill, Johnson was actually interested in learning about the subject offered, juvenile delinquency, because he works full time off-campus in a group home for under-age offenders.

He raged in frustration in the hallway of Storm Hall, "That's it, I've had it with this place, I'm ready to drop out of school."

Another's strategy
Although Johnson and more than a dozen other uninvited souls gave up on crashing that class after the first 10 minutes, super-crasher Luter remained glued to her third-row seat, listening attentively to the instructor.
Diehards like her say they stay all the way to mid-terms if they have to. "I know it's mean, but I look at the people sitting next to me and I want them to leave," said Luter, glancing around, assessing the competition because she says there are always slackers. "I keep telling myself I deserve this class. I've worked really hard to get where I am."

As a transfer student from Orange County, Luter carries a 3.45 GPA.

After 16 hours of doing battle and attending six classes on opening day, Luter had revamped her schedule more than a dozen times. She needed a language course but, with no aptitude for foreign languages, she devoted her time toward working on this loophole: If enough years have passed since a student has taken a language, they can start over again.

So, instead of Spanish 4, she signed up for Spanish 1.

Not the Spanish class she had officially registered for because that time conflicted with the sociology course she wanted.

Not the sociology course she had registered for, despite its promising-sounding title, "love, anger and jealousy," but the one she was crashing, the sociology of juvenile delinquency.

If she got into it, that would allow her to switch that advertising class

Well, to follow the strategy of crashing clearly requires a lot of hazelnut lattes and Diet Cokes, which was the only fortification Luter stopped for throughout the day.

Finally after plunking down $240 at the bookstore, she took off her armor. For just a little while, she was just Joanna the kid again.

"We went to Mr. Peabody's, it's this place near campus with really good food. And I had a chef salad, and we split some French fries," she said with a happy sigh. "It always hits the spot."