Mild-Mannered Graduate Student Bosses Sorting of 14,000 Cards

Everyone in College, even a Freshman, knows Memorial Hall at registration time, knows the manila envelopes, study cards, solicitors, the bursar's bill, and how to write his name last name first, first name second, and middle name or names trailing at the end.

What most people don't know, not even upperclassmen, is what becomes of the cards which they have covered with proper legal titles, and why they must be so painstaking and write "last name first, first name second," and so on.

The man who can provide the answers to these and other questions is Stanley K. Leonard, the man behind the scenes in Mem Hall who went to bat this year for the second time with the bugaboo of registration.

He Runs Mem Hall

He is a mild mannered little man a graduate student, who gives little hint of the hectic world over which he presides, but it is Leonard who is the invisible power of Memorial Hall, and it is Leonard to whom study cards eventually find their way after being deposited in awe-inspiring University 2.

Up in the top of University Hall, amidst the offices of real and baby deans, Leonard has temporary headquarters in the faculty room, and there is absolute dictator of every study card in College. If you signed up for History 1 and land in Economics A, it's Leonard who got you there.

From 4 o'clock this afternoon, when "the avalanche," Leonard's own word, of study cards begins to pour in, until some time along about midnight, he, his assistants, and your study card will be closeted in the faculty room.

There Leonard presides as top-kick over a hierarchy of sorter-outers, and watches over a system whereby study cards are made into course lists.

The first step in the process, he says, naturally enough, is to separate the different fields, Government, History, Economics and so forth, and then to break the fields down into courses, Sociology A from Sociology 8, for example.

This process, the sorting of approximately 14,000 course slips, which takes 30 men about eight hours, doesn't bother Leonard and his cohorts a bit. It is what he calls "research work" that bothers him, the translation of unreadable names, or tracking courses that don't exist through the catalogue of studies. That's the kind of thing, says Leonard, that upsets his system.

The system itself is simple enough. There are many tables in the faculty room, and each field, Chemistry, English, or whatever it might be, is assigned a table. There, a group of workers, each being responsible for one or two courses, extracts his own particular course slips and compiles a list.