Some students lack knowledge of the full range of transport options that are at their disposal. During the first few weeks the semester, Ntakirutimana was unaware of the free M2 shuttle and instead had to spend money on the train rides each week.

Others say there is simply a lack of awareness on campus about the opportunity to cross-register.

“From my personal experience, when I tell people I’m cross-registered, half of them either say, ‘oh I didn’t realize that was a thing,’ and the other half say, ‘are you taking the accounting class?’” said Alex S. Peed ’18, who is currently cross-registered in Corporate and Financial Accounting.

Welsh also speculates that some students only discover the resource late in their academic careers, at which point they have fewer semesters left and less time to fulfill their various academic requirements.

Though many students who have gone through the process said it was straightforward, there still can be some inconveniences.

“It’s definitely not a thing,” Lang said of the prominence of cross-registration at Harvard. “It did take some time for me to figure out what I needed to do. With this class, I needed to get the professor to sign this special form, I needed to take this form MIT myself, then I needed to bring copy to registrar and then it didn’t show up on study card until weeks later.”

To rid the process of administrative hassles, the Registrar’s Office is looking to automate the process by putting it online, according to Welsh. In doing so, undergraduates will be able directly search MIT courses through the University catalog, much like they currently can with graduate school courses. They will then be able to petition for MIT classes online, reducing the need to travel back forth for physical signatures. Welsh said the office looks to implement these changes by next semester, though it is possible it will be delayed until the fall of 2016.

—Staff writer Theo C. Lebryk can be reached at tlebryk@college.harvard.edu.