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Class starts tomorrow.
I feel like I can describe the university experience thusly: I've been doing my own thing during break and sporadically checking BlackBoard and my SIUE email. In early-mid December, I got a reading list from one of my classes (Victorian Lit) so I could make sure to have all the books before classes begin and I went out and made sure to purchase them all on a variety of websites - they all had to be specific editions, without exception, so it took a little time to get them affordably. Fast foward to the 11th.
First of all, I've purchased my parking pass, but my old one expires today and classes don't start until tomorrow, so I'll have to run and pick it up from the pay lot to make sure I don't get a ticket, then drive to a pass lot and re-park, then go to class. A small bother, but clearly a poorly structured setup.
As of 1/9/15, three days before class, Victorian Lit was cancelled due to lack of enrollment, even though there's not really all that many grad classes even available to sign up for. Now I have 60 bucks worth of paperback Victorian-era literature for no particular reason. It's not exactly my favorite era, but it was required for grad cred. Luckily, I have two semesters to locate a new period class and I'd signed up for more classes than I strictly needed, so I won't be dropped from full time. If I hadn't had an additional class, I'd lose all of my loan money for the semester and might have had to drop from the program this semester due to lack of enough money to survive. Also because I didn't pay out of pocket, the school assumed I'd get the loan money, but when it's not forthcoming, they'd just drop me anyhow since it was never actually paid.
Dodged a bullet, there. Seems advisable in the future to sign up for more than I can really deal with and drop the first day if all of my classes go through.
Contrawise, I got another email on the 9th from my 502 professor that, while not possessing a syllabus or any kind of reading list, professed his hope that we had already read the Freud for the 12th. If you want the reading list, it was already up on the class description (of which there are actually three, so it took a while to find the right one. The right one, as it happens, links directly to an online bookstore for SIUE unavailable through any other link that proposes that you buy them there on the spot). It was 16 bucks on the student book store website, but I found it on Amazon kindle for 2. Purchasing it and sending it to my Kindle cloud reader, I discovered that not only had I read it before but actually owned it in the $100+ Norton Critical Lit Theory anthology I bought last semester.
Are these really the people who are going to be evaluating me?
I feel like I can describe the university experience thusly: I've been doing my own thing during break and sporadically checking BlackBoard and my SIUE email. In early-mid December, I got a reading list from one of my classes (Victorian Lit) so I could make sure to have all the books before classes begin and I went out and made sure to purchase them all on a variety of websites - they all had to be specific editions, without exception, so it took a little time to get them affordably. Fast foward to the 11th.
First of all, I've purchased my parking pass, but my old one expires today and classes don't start until tomorrow, so I'll have to run and pick it up from the pay lot to make sure I don't get a ticket, then drive to a pass lot and re-park, then go to class. A small bother, but clearly a poorly structured setup.
As of 1/9/15, three days before class, Victorian Lit was cancelled due to lack of enrollment, even though there's not really all that many grad classes even available to sign up for. Now I have 60 bucks worth of paperback Victorian-era literature for no particular reason. It's not exactly my favorite era, but it was required for grad cred. Luckily, I have two semesters to locate a new period class and I'd signed up for more classes than I strictly needed, so I won't be dropped from full time. If I hadn't had an additional class, I'd lose all of my loan money for the semester and might have had to drop from the program this semester due to lack of enough money to survive. Also because I didn't pay out of pocket, the school assumed I'd get the loan money, but when it's not forthcoming, they'd just drop me anyhow since it was never actually paid.
Dodged a bullet, there. Seems advisable in the future to sign up for more than I can really deal with and drop the first day if all of my classes go through.
Contrawise, I got another email on the 9th from my 502 professor that, while not possessing a syllabus or any kind of reading list, professed his hope that we had already read the Freud for the 12th. If you want the reading list, it was already up on the class description (of which there are actually three, so it took a while to find the right one. The right one, as it happens, links directly to an online bookstore for SIUE unavailable through any other link that proposes that you buy them there on the spot). It was 16 bucks on the student book store website, but I found it on Amazon kindle for 2. Purchasing it and sending it to my Kindle cloud reader, I discovered that not only had I read it before but actually owned it in the $100+ Norton Critical Lit Theory anthology I bought last semester.
Are these really the people who are going to be evaluating me?