“One to three students every year walk in the procession but have to complete one course,” she says. “We get really upset when we see that. We hate to see that.”

She says she anticipates that the registrar’s office will face significant changes in the next few years, with the upcoming curricular review and the reorganization of the College.

And currently, the office is working hard to finish up changes in the grading system—recalculating each student’s GPA to conform to a four-point scale and notifying each student of this change.

“People have a lot on their plates,” she says.

As a result, Becella says that her hectic schedule has left her with little time to pursue her own interests, which include travelling, gardening or painting.

Few students ever come face to face with the registrar during their time at Harvard.

“She is known as the bureaucracy,” says Brenden S. Millstein ’06.

But a small group of her admirers and advisees say they will be sad to see her go.

“We share a lot of interests,” says Erinn M. Wattie ’06, one of the two first-years whom Becella takes on as advisees each year. “She seemed very important...but she always seemed very warm.”

“I am really happy not because she is leaving, but because she will be happy and it is something that she has been looking forward to for a long time,” Wattie adds.

Ironically, the New York City native, born and raised in a Greenwich Village stretch of West 12th Street, says she fell into her current line of work because of her desire to go abroad.

“I love to travel, or I did when I was younger, and I wanted to work overseas,” she says.

When an advertisement for a registrar position at a university in Europe caught her eye, she decided to take it. However, she soon moved back the United States and ended up working for nine years as a registrar at the University of Arizona and at Boston University before coming to Harvard.

The administration was more centralized there, she says, which in many ways made her job easier, particularly when dealing with jointly offered courses.

“The big difference here at Harvard is that everything is so decentralized,” Becella says. “Coming from two centralized universities, you are accustomed to working in a central post.”

But Becella says she’s sure the next registrar to juggle the course schedules of 10,000 students will be up to the task.

“If you have had experience,” she says, “you can generally get through the day.”

—Staff Writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu.