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fnoboqbl · 7 years ago

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This is how they get you.

first i went to uci as an undeclared major in 2011, ended up having issues with depression and substance abuse, and with tuition hikes and no sense of direction i came back to bakersfield to figure out a major and a way forward.

enrolled at bc in 2012, declared my major at the end of 2014 once i had finished all my GE reqs. Didn’t leave bc until after spring of 2015 because a string of bad counselors advised me to take various classes fulfilling the same requirements over and over, essentially wasting an entire year of my time there. finally left bc without even getting the AA I went there for because some counselor didn’t add up the classes right and i came up a unit short at the end of spring 2015 and just applied at csub. they let me in as if I had gotten the AA, which was a homie move by them, and i thought my days of bullshit counseling and admin fuckery were over.

I declared as a english major with credential emphasis (EMCE), which i was led to believe made me an english major and an education minor, where the minor would count as a teaching credential after taking the cset/cbest. something like that. the program advisor for EMCE turned out to be hands down the worst teacher i’ve ever had, just fully incompetent, and i had heard that Point Loma Nazarene University had an accelerated credential program for people with Bachelors degrees in english. Since English Major Language and Literature (EMLL) at csub required fewer units, i decided to switch majors so i could get the bachelors faster and then get the credential from plnu.

that meant i had to change minors too, (and obviously also meant that i had already taken some classes i wouldnt need anymore as a EMLL major) and all that wasn’t a big deal.

the problem really started when i changed majors, because suddenly nobody seemed to know when my calendar year was. I started college in 2011, but I started csub in 2015, and in those 4 years the requirements had changed. I kept going to counselors and getting different information about what was required of me to graduate. Then the faculty tower (which housed the offices of most of the professors in the humanities department, along with the English department chair and the main counselor for the program) was torn down and relocated, which put most of these vitally important people out of commission during the moving process.

this coincided with the decision to move csub from a quarter system school to a semester system school. This meant a complete restructuring of the classes the school offered, class names and numbers, and graduation outlines for students. People on the pre-Quarter-to-Semester (Q2S) system had to stick to the requirements of their calendar year, as per CSUB’s guarantee that requirements wouldn’t switch up and potentially keep you in college purgatory.

except, what was my calendar year? I have graduation roadmaps filled out by NUMEROUS counselors, stating variably that my calendar year is 2011-12, 2012-13, 2014-15, 2015-16, and 2016-17.

so i went to the CSUB page- not that I hadn’t before, of course, but i thought maybe this time i’d find something- Then to my program advisor. Then to academic advising. then to the department chair... Except oops, he RETIRED like 3 months ago and the new dept. chair has decided to take a LONG vacation out of the country for the summer. All I wanted was a sheet of paper telling me what classes I had to take if I wanted to graduate with a degree in English. I JUST WANTED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I HAD TO DO TO GET A DEGREE. After no fewer than 8 hours on campus, spread over 2 consecutive days, i was beginning to think such a thing didn’t even exist. I tracked down the previous department chair, he told me to find the program advisor and not to call him again (after all, he was retired). So I found the program advisor, who also had no clue. That's the top 2 authorities of the English department at csub, both not knowing what a person has to do to get a degree in their program. I went to the advisors, who told me to ask the dept chair. I ended up walking into the office of the theatre department chair, where finally some secretary listened to me recount my entire college story, and then got on her computer and just pulled the exact list of requirements I was looking for off a mysterious “V File” somewhere in cyberspace. The whole time sb. Was constantly reminding me me how much this “wasn’t her job”, as she was "just a secretary", but she still found it. Finally, I thought. At least I have the paper.

It was the requirements for the 2016-2017 year, butBut I trusted her. She was the only one who could produce the paper, after all... and I hit pretty much every person I could think of who would (and should) know. I applied for graduation based on those requirements in 2017 for fall 2018, and thought i was out of the woods.

WRONG AGAIN.

i get a letter from csub stating that I have unfulfilled requirements, insufficient credits to graduate. what the fuck. Turns out THEY NEVER HAD OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS FROM BC OR UCI. then, turns out they were EVALUATING ME BASED ON THE NEW CRITERION WHEN I WAS TOLD I WAS ON THE OLD CATALOG. so graduation denied, I go back in to find out that under the old catalog (which, i remind you, i had not yet gotten a roadmap for, since i was given the 2016-17 one) i had to take 3 “theme” courses; Themes A,B,andC. Okay fuck. so i go to sign up for these theme courses. But guess what? Now they’re themes Q R and S, because its a new system there now and they offer classes satisfying Q R and S, and THERE’S NO GUIDE FOR FUCKING FIGURING OUT WHICH OF THESE Q R AND S CLASSES SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS FROM THE OLD CATALOG. does q correspond to A? does R correspond to B? who knows? But Riley, couldn’t you just take all 3 and assume the same shit is covered? I’m so glad you asked because that’s what I thought too, but sadly no, I am attempting to fill old requirements using the new catalog and ALL THE TITLES ARE MIXED THE FUCK UP OR UNRELATED or include extra shit or exclude important shit, and when I click on the handy-dandy Q2S conversion chart on the csub website i get a message saying i need authorization i don’t have.

lets skip ahead. I cut off my left arm and squeezed the blood into the mouth of a gargoyle which then sprung to life and figured all that shit out. I got enrolled into the classes, at the age of 25 years and 9 months old, healthcare expiring in 3 months, still living with my parents, broke because school is my life now, and i paid my grad check fees with the tuition for my last semester at csub.

2 months later the grad check money is returned with no note, nothing. just “here’s your check for $70, enjoy.” I was suspicious. I went online to make sure my shit’s all okay.

And it was, and I lived happily ever after. /s

-_-

now they don’t have my substituted classes (on which i got approval from both dept chairs, previous and current), they don’t have my bc classes, some classes i was told would satisfy certain requirements are no longer satisfactory or valid, and It says i never applied for graduation, which I had surmised when my graduation fee was mysteriously sent back to me.

I’m 8 years into my college experience at this point. BC lost my UCI transcripts not once, not twice, not thrice, not four times, but 5 TIMES. I have 5 receipts showing official transcripts being sent to BC on 5 different occasions. They lost my official transcripts five times and got away with that!!! I retook English B1 THREE TIMES because they kept on not-having the records of me having taken that class at UCI. Imagine how stupid I felt when I aced the class, then showed up back in that same classroom the next semester, where the same professor looked at me the first day like... “dude... you passed this class, what are you doing here” and I had to be the idiot saying “idunno, they tole me to take the class again so i’m just taking the class again”. You’d think that after taking the same exact class the semester before, BC would have at least had the transcripts of me doing that, but if this shit made any kind of sense I wouldn’t be posting about it. I ended up with 80 extra units (that’s enough for an entire other degree) that will not be counted toward my B.A... which as it stands now isn’t even coming because my application to graduate after fall 2018 was not processed, which is why the $70 was returned to me when I tried to pay the fee to run the check again. Again, there was no letter helping me put these pieces together... just the check, sent back to me, and nothing else.

The deadline to graduate after Fall 2018 was September 25, 2017. I only became sure that I would graduate after Fall 2018 like, 3 weeks before Fall 2018 started, when I was rolled into my final class off the waitlist. There were like 20 people though who did not get into the English BA finishing course off the waitlist. What happened? If they were aiming to graduate the same time as me, they all would have had to put in their request to graduate nearly a year earlier (a total of 4 semesters earlier, counting summer school).... which means that their failure to get rolled into this finishing course would require them to reapply for graduation at the next possible time... AND SINCE THE FINISHING COURSE IS FOR SOME IDIOTIC REASON ONLY OFFERED DURING THE FALL SEMESTER, THAT MEANS THEY’D HAVE TO APPLY IN SEPTEMBER OF 2019 TO GRADUATE AFTER FALL 2020. And that’s just how the stars aligned for them.

So either you have to apply every goddamn semester starting 2 years before you’re trying to, or you have to execute the last 2 years of college with no hitches or else you get fucked for another 2 years by the cactus dick of the school system.

Update 4/14/22

Not that anyone’s on the edge of their seat waiting for this update, but holy shit this was not even close to the end of the tunnel. Luckily I did not have to wait an extra 2 years to graduate, there was just a lag in the system that did eventually work itself out, and I did get my bachelors in 2018. And I only had to sleep with 3 school officials to make it happen. I then applied for grad school at PLNU, which required writing a personal statement explaining my VERY spotty academic record and subpar GPA, which took some serious spin, but I did it.

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fnoboqbl · 7 years ago

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I’m pretty sure obsessing about free radicals /free radical damage causes free radical damage

At what point does the effort of maintaining a youthful appearance get defeated by the fact that so much of your youth is being wasted researching how to maintain that youthful appearance

When does the stress of researching this shit and worrying about it outweigh the happiness you get from looking young

IMHO, the makeup/beauty industry is an industry of manufactured fear, & this industry has more products for sale that claim to solve the problems it makes u afraid of than actual answers as to how to solve the problem

... Sure, some of it probably helps. I’m not denying the existence of free radicals. I’m just saying that if I have to monitor every aspect of my waking life and structure my exercise, dietary, and skincare/ hygiene routines around the idea of free radicals, then fuck it, that’s not how I want to spend my life.

Some people say they get enjoyment from caring for their skin, which on the one hand is great, do you; but on the other hand, I kinda feel like that’s just reframing the culture of fear in a positive light...

I’m taking more about the subconscious fears behind the enjoyment one would get from caring for their skin... the fear of aging, the fear of having a darker skin tone, the fear of carcinogens, etc. ...

All rational fears, of course... At the end of the day, tho, it becomes fear of the things that cause aging (free radicals, collagen, dehydration) fear of all the shit associated with having a darker skin tone (I don’t even wanna get into that) and a profound interest in cataloging all the shit that causes cancer (fucking everything) and avoiding it all.

the fact that there’s a whole industry profiting off this is what really sets off alarms for me. To my knowledge, we barely know anything about how to stop free radicals from doing radicalism freely in your dna or whatever, but there’s like a thousand different products that say they neutralize the radicalism...

In the meantime, people like me are hurdling toward life as a senior citizen (apparently) focusing my energy on productive shit like dismantling the culture of fear surrounding free radicalism and something about the oppressive beauty standards of a superfluous privileged class being forced on themselves and others, ultimately destroying our already slim chances of cultivating happiness and self confidence.

Next week: capitalism rewards pshchopathic behavior and is both a symptom and the cause of systematic sexism, racism, and homophobia.

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