Oh the Bureaucracy

Well, things worked such that I was able to take my comprehensive exam on the regular date a few weeks ago.  I still haven't heard back if I passed or if there will be additional requirements for my graduation.  If the department finds that my answers are lacking, they could assign an oral defense, a research paper, a retake of the exam, etc.

In a fresh turn of events, I got an email from the administrative assistant of my department.  (She is a wonderful woman, who really deserves a career title better than 'administrative assistant,' which makes her sound like the person who directs phone traffic and pushes papers all day.  She is the den mother of the department, always there, always making sure that everyone has filled out and turned in necessary paperwork, talked to the correct advisor, been given the right information, and knows about the latest administrative changes.  In short, the department would not exist without her because nothing would get done--she is the glue that prevents professors and students alike from losing everything from their keys to their heads.)

A few weeks ago, she forwarded an email to me asking 'if I had been informed of this situation.'  I read on to an email that had been sent to the department stating that the graduate school had put my application for candidacy on hold because they were contesting 2 of the classes I was counting towards my MA.  I immediately emailed my advisor, cc'ing the administrative assistant.  The AA emailed me back to say that with spring break the following weak, my advisor had already cut out and gone to Hawaii.  I emailed another faculty; three days later I got another email back that the other faculty member had taken a look at my academic record with the AA and figured it out.  Two of the classes I am counting toward my graduate degree were technically taken when I was an undergrad, and I will need to file a petition to have the graduate school accept them.

So now I am writing a petition to the dean of the school politely asking that graduate level classes that I took as an advanced undergraduate be counted toward my MA.  I am also filling out the transfer request form and hunting down the necessary signatures that I need from incredibly busy and hard to reach faculty.  Telling my supervisor about this situation, he remarked that it was kind of ironic that I was seemingly getting punished for being an overachiever, because the reason I counted undergraduate work toward my degree was that I took graduate classes as an undergraduate and passed them beautifully.  Because I did this, I even had to take PhD level classes while doing my MA to make up the deficit.

I'm feeling a little like the graduate school is behaving like an insurance company by denying my claim to see if I can file the necessary paperwork in time.  If I can't, the school could--in theory--milk me for another $2,500+ worth of tuition for next semester.  And I thought the comprehensive exam was going to be the end of the technicalities.

In other news, I am still pushing forward trying to complete my NLP class, but the professor has yet to assign the work I need to do.  We decided that I would complete homeworks 3 and 4 of this semester and the final exam, but he hasn't posted them yet (he knows I'm on a deadline, so I'm not sure what's up with this).