“If it didn’t suck, it wouldn’t be grad school.” – C.Nothing
So yesterday was Day One. So far everything I’ve said about my A.T. Still University experience has been all sunshine and daffodils. I know from previous experience as an eLearner, however, that there’s no road in higher education (or anything else meaningful) that doesn’t have a few potholes in it.
So in the last few days I’ve had two. The first is that I have the wrong edition of textbook. I wrote earlier about saving money by checking my textbooks out of the library of the university where I work rather than buying them new or even used. This worked perfectly for my book on finance in higher education, but as for my research methods book, I got the earlier edition. Now, sometimes instructors don’t mind if you have an older edition of a book, the material is often nearly the same, and only the page numbers are off. But in this case I got a book several editions old, so I went ahead and bit the bullet and bought the right edition used off Amazon. I’m still saving a lot of money over buying it new, but so much for the idea of being on time!
The second thing was that my financial aid hadn’t yet come through. They still have to receive my Student Aid Report from the Department of Education so that I can go through “entry counseling” and receive my student loans. It should only take about two weeks for the funds to be available to them, but they told me, nope, can’t wait, if I wanted to start now I had to make a payment to them of this term’s tuition, then get reimbursed once my aid comes in. This is three grand, which as it happens I don’t actually have lying around. Since they wouldn’t budge on it, I had to canvass some relatives to arrange for a bridge loan the old fashioned way.
It would have been better had they said, hey two weeks, sure, we can work with you. But unfortunately that’s not the case. I understand that a school can’t do its business unless it gets paid, but considering the short timeframe, this strikes me as pretty inflexible, especially since not everyone would be in the same position I was to find the cash, even on a short term basis.
Next up, is there a doctor in the house?