As a graduating senior with nearly all my requirements checked off, this should have been the best semester ever. And it started that way. Twelve credits, two of them electives, I was looking to breeze by to graduation. And then last Tuesday happened.
Yes, last Tuesday, as in the day before classes began. Or, as it turned out for me, the day before everyone else's classes began, because by the end of that morning I was left with a jumbled schedule and no idea what to do about it, except bang my head against the wall for hours on end and mentally strangle responsible parties in the office of Records and Registration.
I had logged into TESS to check my course numbers. I was scheduled for two three-hour classes, one on Tuesdays and one on Wednesdays. But that morning, I found that my schedule now showed two three-hour classes on Tuesday nights - at the exact same time.
Being a compulsive e-mail checker, I wondered how I could have missed the e-mail telling me one of my classes had been moved. I checked my old mail and my trashed e-mails only to discover that, alas, no e-mail had been sent. Why TESS didn't catch the conflict either, I'll never know.
The professor of the changed class said his class had never been on a Wednesday - Records and Registration had put the wrong day on TESS during registration. When the error was corrected over break, it pulverized my entire schedule, and I'm sure other students' as well. But the change was something the office apparently felt wasn't important enough to inform us about.
Now, I understand that Records and Registration is one of the busiest, if not the busiest office on campus. I'm not denying its plate is full. But I've received e-mails in the past telling me a course was being cancelled - clearly the office isn't incapable of sending notification. And the fact remains that last Tuesday, while most members of the student body were buying their books and laying out snazzy outfits for the first day of school, I was shooting desperate e-mails to professors who would no doubt like to ring my neck as I begged, cried and pleaded to be excused from or signed into anything that would correct the error in my schedule.
My options were slim. I was forced to drop my ever-so-appealing film class and search for anything that would put me at 12 credits so I wouldn't be knocked down to part-time status, thereby risking eviction from my comfy little townhouse. But let's face it - are there any good classes left open by the time the semester starts?
A week after the ordeal began, it looks like things are straightened out, but I hope this editorial will serve as a thank you to two groups of people. Firstly, I want to sincerely thank the various professors and administrators in the English department who worked to find me a solution and eventually allowed me to slip into a last-minute internship and salvage some bit of enjoyment from my last semester here.
But more importantly, I would like to thank the office of Records and Registration. By keeping me uninformed while instigating the change that made me an insomniac for a week and gave me the blood pressure that no doubt rivals that of the Incredible Hulk, you have made me gladder than ever that I will be graduating in May and never have to deal with this bullshit ever again.
