Degrees & Red Tape

Degrees & Red Tape

It's another nasty dreary rainy cold day...and exams are in 2 weeks...well less than that. I wonder if they'll kick me out of the honours program if I don't do well in my marketing 202 paper. That would be a disaster considering all de trouble I went through to settle and get approval for my degree. The uni is pretty flexible especially since I wanna do a combined honours but there's alot of red tape and paper work to go through. I've had to see alot of 'high-ranking' people in both the departments of psychology and marketing and have spent hours talking with them...

Lots of stuff can go wrong with a complicated degree that requires special permission for practically every paper. I wonder sometimes why I'm making life difficult for myself...like why don't I just do an ordinary degree? I start panicking every time something goes wrong...I think my lifespan has been shortened by quite a bit since.

Life-shortening Experience 1
Last year I emailed the psyc HOD to ask for special permission to do 3rd year psyc this year and do 2nd year psyc next year instead coz I wanted to go on exchange in 2nd semester and so I couldn't take psyc papers in 2nd semester. Anyway I mentioned I intended to do a combined honours degree in marketing and psyc. To my horror, he emailed back saying I couldn't do a combined honours degree in marketing and psyc coz it was 2 different faculties and u can only do a combined honours within the same faculty. Well if you had planned out your entire degree and took papers towards that degree you would have panicked like I did after being told that you can't do that degree. I emailed him to explain my "special situation" and arranged to see him and we managed to work something out so all was good on the condition that I maintain my grades and get admitted into the honours program for both marketing and psyc.

Life-shortening Experience 2
As I said my degree was conditional on my getting into honours for both marketing and psyc. So when I got an invitation to apply for psyc but not for marketing I panicked. I emailed the marketing department and asked why I didn't qualify. Anyway it was some time before they emailed me back to say that I did meet the criteria and they didn't know why I didn't receive an invitation, but I could download it off de school of business website and post it. So I did.

Life-shortening Experience 3
I wanted to do a combined honours with psyc as a science subject rather than an arts subject. However, this year the honours coordinator for psyc send me a letter saying that I've got into honours, but it would be under arts coz I didn't have enough points worth of science papers. Yep it's true I didn't have enough, but there was no way I could have had more science points given that I had to do marketing papers as well and I was taking the maximum course load. I emailed the honours coordinator to ask how I could get into the science honours roll and she had to check with the head of science faculty to see if they could make a special exception. And they did, but it took some time.

I am hoping that all will go smoothly from now, but it prob won't. I, however, now know why so many people choose to do med, or dentistry or pharmacy...it's easy...you have your whole degree planned out for you...

Oh wait! There's a moral to the story...and the moral is: Email is the most wonderful invention for helping to ease life-shortening experiences pertaining to complicated degrees. 8p