That time of the semester
The headaches, the cramps . . . in one’s patience, er, muscle, the near-hemorrhaging . . . of money. Okay, so the metaphor is pretty warped to begin with. That’s what happens when you start with the title and try to make the first line match. I don’t recommend it.
The point is, my registration window for next semester opened at 1:30 this afternoon. Most of the classes I need at this point are upper-division and won’t fill up anyway, but after all the crap I’ve been through with registration at this school, I’d rather get everything nailed down as soon as I can.
I’ve registered for all the courses I know I need to graduate: Advanced Physics Lab, Thermal Physics, Electricity and Magnetism II, Vector Analysis, Intro to Computer Science II, and Advanced Latin*. This comes out to sixteen hours, which leaves room for one screw-up within the normal cap of nineteen hours, and two screw-ups within the absolute supermax overload cap of twenty-two hours.
The extra space is important because there are a trillion things that could go wrong between here and graduation. I have a lot of transfer credits that either haven’t gone through or haven’t gone through as the classes I think they ought to be. This means many petitions to several different departments, which I’ll admit I’m behind on—I should have done them last semester. If any one of these petitions fails, I assume I’ll have to retake the class.
There also might be magical hidden requirements I don’t know about. You’d think this wouldn’t happen—maybe the university and the college would come up with clear, standard policies, and they’d be printed up in a book and handed out to everyone, say—but you’d be surprised. The degree requirements, as far as I can tell, are only available online, in three different places (core, college, and major), and it’s not always clear how or whether the requirements from those three places overlap.
Not only that, but not everyone seems to agree what the requirements are. I haven’t talked to anyone in the brand-new advising office yet, but I haven’t heard good things about their general competence and agreement on what the rules are (with the online material or with each other).
Also, some of the rules have recently changed. The Math department, for example, seems to have dropped the Computer Science requirement from their BS degree, at least if the website is to be believed. Since I joined the major before the rules changed, the new rules don’t apply to me, which is all well and good, but there’s no link back to the old rules, or even any indication that there ARE old rules, and that they still apply to anyone who’s been a major for more than zero semesters.
I realize I’m ranting**, so I’ll step back and take a few deep breaths, but the practical result of all this is that there are many things that could go wrong with my planned graduation. Oh, I’ll graduate all right, but if more than two problems pop up I might have to drop down to a Physics minor (and thus lose my Latin minor, I think), and that would make me very sad. Well, angry first, but eventually sad, I’m sure.
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* Technically I haven’t registered for Latin yet because the time on the schedule overlaps my lab, but there are only three people in the class, so we’ll get to decide on a time amongst ourselves.
** I don’t hate my school, really. Just the administration, which doesn’t seem to administer itself well, at least when it comes to academics.