... And a Pound of Flesh

This is going to be a long post. The process has been very long and just keeps getting longer. This post won't get any longer.

I need to write a letter. Someone at the University of Arkansas needs to understand how incredibly difficult they make it for their prospective students to work with them. In my five years as a student and employee at RIT and my year working at BVU, I never could have imagined being able to function the way these people do. I marvel that they ever accomplish anything, aside from inducing the occasional psychotic break in their students.

First, I should admit I'm not a standard case. I am applying to the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, but that part's not so unusual. Unfortunately, that's about where I stop fitting with their expectations. I already have a bachelors degree, but they deal mostly with current undergraduate students who are applying to transition directly to graduate school. I have my bachelors degree from another institution, and they don't really know how all of my classes match up to the ones they're used to seeing in-house. I have not taken all of the undergraduate pre-requisite courses because I wasn't anticipating being a teacher, and because the school where I went didn't offer them. I live off campus and do not have a U of A email address, campus phone, or mail box, all of which seem to be their only methods of communication.

All that considered, though, I can't be the only one in this situation. Surely the old man with gray hair or the middle aged woman with three kids aren't just finishing their undergrad degrees this semester. Surely they don't live on campus with their entire families. Though my situation may not be the norm, it shouldn't be anything they've never seen before. Yet going into the seventh month of dealing with these people, they still look at me like I've descended from my alien space ship on a beam of light to steal all their chocolate bars.

The first problem I encountered was a total lack of public information. The department website has only the bare minimum of requirements information and it's all written in the organizational lingo of the University of Arkansas that only a veteran of their registration process could possibly comprehend. Hello folks, what are all these numbers and abbreviations? CIED 3032? CIED 4031? Ever heard of listing a course description, or maybe at least the title?

Clearly, we students are not allowed to look up information for ourselves, so if you want answers you must ask questions. Of course, then you encounter the staff members who don't understand their own process, or those who enjoy changing it every time you come back into their offices. In this case, it was a several week struggle to get them to tell me what undergraduate education courses I would need to take to qualify for the graduate school. After sitting on my paperwork for two months, they finally sent official word of which classes I would need to take. I received this information four days after the beginning of term.

Fortunately, they had already told me ahead of time to submit an application for Spring so I could take those classes. I'd paid my $30 and filed my paperwork and was ready to go. It would have been nice if they'd bothered to tell me that none of the classes they were checking for were offered in the Spring. "Oh well," they told me. "Just wait until Summer."

But that was all they told me. What they should have said was that I wasn't done with the process. I've double and triple checked: this was the last thing listed on any of the checklists I was able to find online at the time. But oh, no. There is really a whole other office and department I was supposed to be visiting with. I found this out when they called me up and asked why I didn't show up for my interview. They also wanted to know why I hadn't turned in my portfolio or letters of recommendation. "Portfolio?" I asked. "Letters of recommendation? No one mentioned that at the College of Education office." Of course not. All of those things are handled through the departmental office which no one had even thought to tell me existed, let alone that I might need to go visit. I have a sneaking suspicion that they created this new office and hired a bunch of staff people after they talked to me just because it'd been a while since they'd gotten to break out the white jackets.

Skip ahead 3 months after they graciously allowed me to scramble for all of the other-other requirements I hadn't been told about (and still to this day cannot find referenced online), and it's time to register for those Summer session classes. They have this nifty online registration system that you have to long into at least three times before it actually works. They assure me this is normal. No one I can find has any kind words to say about this system, but they all seem to accept that it is smarter than they are and worship it accordingly.

Unfortunately, this technological demi-god of randomness and misfortune has decided to smite me for my wickedness. Either I don't exist, or there are two of me, depending on whom I ask. I still haven't figured out which it is. I've visited six offices, had phone conversations with two others, and received 11 different answers. The one thing they all seem to agree on: I'm fucked.

Finally, I found one very helpful lady who was able to put together a plan of action that involved my visiting or calling no fewer than five different offices on campus to have my records completely expunged from the computer system and then having them re-entered in a very specific order. In the meantime, the class I was told to register for in the Spring is now full in the Summer and I'm offering to fix their computers myself with a sizeable supply of homemade incendiary devices.

I've said several times when dealing with the redundant offices (three for Admissions; at least three so far for the Graduate School; two for my department; and one that serves a function I'm really not sure of but was the only one to actually provide any productive assistance through this whole ordeal) that if I had another practical choice for getting my MAT I'd take it in a heart beat. Today they have me questioning whether the degree is even worth all this heartache at all.

Because they can't won't reactivate my application from the semester when I didn't actually take any classes, I forked over another $30 today. This is worse than taxes and a pound of flesh. If this doesn't work, I think I'm going to offer them an animal sacrifice. Please excuse me while I go build an alter.