I know I shouldn't be surprised that my last semester of college hasn't started off as smoothly as I had hoped, but I think a part of me honestly thought that things would be different this time, that I'd get the classes I needed, have a great schedule (ideally one with no Friday classes for the first time ever), and graduate in December feeling almost sorry to be leaving this place. No such luck. If this black hole of a university had it their way, I probably wouldn't be graduating in December, or even at all. It seems to be going out of its way to prevent me from fulfilling my graduation requirements. You may recall back in the fall of last year when I tried (several times) to meet with someone/anyone who would confirm for me that I was on track to graduate a semester early, and I went 0 for 3 in those attempts, including an e-mail response from my "advisor" (Number 6) saying that he had never advised a student who graduated a semester early, so he was not qualified to weigh in on this particular issue. Super.
When I signed up for classes back in April, I was initially annoyed by the very limited selection of Spanish classes (the Spanish department has undergone serious budget cuts this year--including the elimination of the Spanish minor program), and the fact that any request to enroll in a course had to be approved by the head of the department (which takes forever), but ultimately I was able to get a pretty good schedule out of it, one that I hoped fulfilled all my major requirements. Then I received an e-mail this week from the Evil Online Course Sign-Up System notifying me that my Spanish Lit class had been canceled because "the funding was not approved." For the record, this is the second time a Spanish class I have signed up for has been canceled. Not moved, not combined with another class, but straight up CANCELED. As in, "Sorry, you're shit out of luck." This normally wouldn't be a huge problem, but that specific course was one I needed to finish my Spanish Lit requirements, and at this point in the summer, there are absolutely no openings in any Spanish Lit class ever in existence. Now if I'd known the class I signed up for would get canceled, I of course could have signed up for another one back in April, when Spanish classes were only slightly impossible to get into (but it's way more fun to give students that false sense of security and then yank it out from under them like a life raft from a drowning man). Now my only option is to beg for mercy (in Spanish) from various apathetic professors and possibly stalk them until one of them lets me into a class that fulfills my last requirement. I'm so desperate, I even (wait for it...) e-mailed my advisor.
*Cue hysterical laughter*
As if that would do any good. Even if he does respond, I'd bet my tuition he is absolutely no help whatsoever. (Honestly, why start now and ruin a perfectly clean record of uselessness?) And so here we are, at the beginning of the end, the twilight of my college life, and if I could send a message to the bright-eyed, only-slightly-cynical little freshman that I once was, it would be this: "You know how you keep saying things will get better when you're a sophomore/junior/senior? Yeah, about that..."
At least there's always grad school...