If you’ve had an opportunity to chat with me in the past few months, you’ll know that I’m set to graduate this May. Yes, I am that obnoxious senior and I provide no apologies because your time will come, too, when you’re excited to move on to the next stage of your life. Still, with that being said, I think that my senior year has been one of the hardest and most expensive, unnecessarily so, if you ask me.
Somehow, with each day that passes, I find it easier to understand how students can drop out of school, just months away from achieving their goals whether it be from stress or financial woes. While I expected to experience some level of difficulty given that the winds of change were preparing to blow on me, I wasn’t expecting that the cause of so much of my frustration and angst would have been caused by my soon to be alma mater.
Preparing to leave NSU has been hard. Not because I’ll miss my friends, colleagues and professors, but because it simply costs way too much to do so and the rigmarole is exhausting.
Before I started attending NSU, and during my first appointment with an academic advisor, I mentioned that I wished to double major in communications studies and visual art. For whatever reason, the man I met with decided that I shouldn’t because the workload would just be “too much for me to handle,” and filled out paperwork declaring that I would only be majoring in communication studies. I was still seeing evidence of his work when I applied to graduate — yes, that’s a thing you have to do — and saw that I only had one major attached to my name in that portal, even though everything else including my account in Sharklink said that I had, in fact, two majors.
Once I began attending classes, I did everything to ensure that I wasn’t assigned to that person and I’ve been happily working with my current advisor since. However a curriculum change enforced halfway through my college career has made securing the classes I need to graduate especially difficult. With my advisor’s help, I’ve had to ask for numerous substitutions, despite the fact that I have taken way more credits than necessary. Yet, I may be the only Art + Design student who was never even able to take a painting class because the availability wasn’t there to do so.
After submitting requests for credit substitutions and my application to graduate, I waited for an approval email to be sent to me. When those didn’t come, I sat on the phone for extended periods of time, trying to get a hold of someone that could help. Then, I waited some more.
Subsequently, I dutifully paid fee after fee and ordered my regalia. Then, I began to focus on applying to graduate schools as one tends to do. Naturally, these schools wanted to know how I performed at NSU and required transcripts. I then learned that NSU charges $10 per transcript — minimum. So, if you’re applying to more than one school, you can imagine how that adds up. Of course, since you haven’t yet graduated, this will be considered an unofficial transcript and you will need to request and pay for another transcript after graduating and committing to a school.
On the day that I visited the One Stop Shop to purchase my transcripts, the printer was out of order and none of the representatives knew when it would be fixed. So, I got back in line, and I waited.
Dear NSU,
While I understand that you might want to adjust a curriculum to ensure that your students receive the best education they can, please consider thinking about students who are already enrolled in the program who will be affected by the change. Further, you can’t possibly know about every time one of your employees makes an autonomous decision that goes against a student’s wishes, so all I can ask is when that student requests a switch and voices concerns, it won’t be brushed off because you think he or she was being obnoxious. Though I understand that there has to be a procedure for applying for graduation, perhaps the current process needs to be revisited. Fix your equipment or buy new ones, please and thank you.
Sincerely,
A student who’s just trying to graduate
