[Off topic] College bullshit

"Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
12/12/2014 at 15:40 • Filed to: personal, off-topic

So about a month ago I went to sign up for pre-advising so I could do advising so I could sign up for classes.

No response from advisor.

Several more emails over the course of a few weeks.

No response.

Go into the advising building, they say he was out of town. Fair enough.

Another student clues me in to a specific professor that can get me through all this and bypass the regular advisors. Finally get time to go see her, she gets me through and I should be able to go sign up for classes.

But I can't.

Because there's a hold on my account.

Somehow they don't have my final transcript.

Off to Parchment I go to send a new transcript. But wait! My high school has to do something before it can get sent through. Another couple days of emailing because the only person who can do that stuff is... out of town. Go figure. Finally get the transcript sent, Parchment says it's sent, so I wait a couple more days and call again when I still have the hold in place. The lady on the other end says they've been swamped with transcripts and will get to it within a couple days.

It is now 5 days later. I call again. They don't have my transcript. I go look at parchment, which says they *do* have it and it has been downloaded. The lady on the other end of the line says they don't have it, and i have to either send it again or bring in a physical copy. So now it's off to my high school to get a physical copy of my transcript, buy gas, then drive 30 minutes up to campus and bring it in before 5:00, then waste an hour sitting around before a meeting starts.

The most annoying part? This might cost me a job. Since I can't sign up for classes yet, a majority of the ones I want will probably be full, resulting in a schedule that leaves no large contiguous openings for working a job. My only hope is I can get all evening classes and work mornings, but that basically kills any remnant of a social life I have, as well as probably my ability to be on the FSAE team which meets in evenings.

Lesson to people in high school: College isn't about grades, it's about learning how to deal with the bureaucratic fucking nightmares you'll have to deal with in the real world later.

DISCUSSION (6)

jariten1781 > Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To
12/12/2014 at 15:55

Sounds about right. Before my last semester there were about 30 people from my class left in my major and we all had a requirment to take this one class that had a limit of 18. The way signups worked you were supposed to call into this stupid automated phone system at midnight the day it opened. Type anything wrong in and it'd kick you out and that'd be it..you're there for another semester. So all my classmates had the list of numbers written out and would, no shit, practice typing into their phones.

Luckily, I found out that there was a Telnet backdoor (does Telnet even exist anymore) that I could get through via having an ISDN line that made me appear on campus so I was able to avoid the race.

But yep, ~10 people got screwed by losing the race and had their schooling artificially lengthened by a semester with whatever that cost. Also the class wasn't offered in summer so they had to wait for fall to take it.

School was all like: don't care, see ya next fall.

Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire > Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To
12/12/2014 at 15:55

Hey when I transferred to NKU they apparently never got my final transcript from my previous school, so they overcharged me by thousands my first 2 semesters before I noticed the error and took it up with them. The refuse to give me that money back because it's my fault, apparently and they don't actually have to do their fucking jobs.

Good luck on getting it all through, man.

Conan > Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To
12/12/2014 at 16:12

Very true, and many of my students don't get it. "But they won't push the SAT deadline back for me? I made my teacher push my test back."

Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To > jariten1781
12/12/2014 at 16:17

How did you even discover the telnet line? My first instinct would have been to call the line with a 56k modem and either annoy the piss out of someone or get a shell login.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire
12/12/2014 at 16:33

they don't actually have to do their fucking jobs.

Accountability - not actually a thing in administration. Not even a little.

jariten1781 > Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To
12/12/2014 at 16:35

The telnet shell was known to the students in engineering and available to anyone on the campus educational network (the dorm and dial-in networks were outside this). You could use it normally to sign up for classes, check enrollment, whatever. The thing was, there was no VPN or anything of the sort to get to that for students available. By happy accident, when I had an ISDN line pulled to my apartment (because cable & DSL were still relatively new and neither were available in my Section 8 unit) the server I logged into gave me full in-network privileges since it had been setup in the long ago and literally no one but me and a couple professors were using it. So, while everyone else was stuck having to dial into the phone system at midnight and fight it since all the labs on the network were locked up after business hours, I could log in as soon as they opened the telnet system to the new classes which was typically around 6pm right after locking up the labs. I basically got a 6 hour head-start on everyone else and could grab whatever I needed.