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August 25, 2005
Back to school
Unfortunately, I have a tendency to procrastinate and my thesis is probably one of the most flagrant examples of this. I started my thesis over five years ago and stopped working on it about a year later. People would bug me about it and the thought of finishing my thesis lay dormant until recently when I finally decided I wanted to finish my thesis and finally get my master's degree. It took me a long time to get to this point and I'm still wondering if I'll be able to do it because, even though I've started contacting my old contacts so I can get the contacts I need to continue research for my thesis, I've had absolutely no luck actually talking to these people on the phone.
As if the process needed to be more difficult, I took a couple of hours off from work to go to school to submit the required readmission form and to register today and I ended having to run back and forth between two buildings like a maniac in order to get all the signatures I needed on my readmit form and was reintroduced to the lovely experience of school bureaucracy in progress. When I got to the bursar's office at 10:30 there was only one window open and a substantial line that moved at about a rate of one person per ten minutes because this just seems to be one of the givens of a bursar's office. After I finally made it to the window, I had to go to the financial aid office, then the admissions office, then the registrar's office all because the readmission form required signatures from each office. By the time I made it to the permanent registrar's office, the temporary registrar's office which processes the registration forms had closed for a daily break they take between 11:30 and 1. I was so stressed by that point--first off because it took me two hours just to get this form signed and second off because it seemed so ludicrous that two essential offices (the temporary registrar's office and the bursar's office) would be closed for an hour and a half in the middle of the day the week before school starts. Only my university would do this.
One interesting thing that I noticed while at the bursar's though was that a woman in front of me had brought $7,500 in cash to pay the balance of her daughter's tuition. She was obviously not from this country (I think she was from Spain) but still?! You couldn't pay me to walk around with that amount of cash in Brooklyn (of course, not that I would have that kind of cash anyway).
Posted by Jennifer at August 25, 2005 09:25 PM