Scholarly Bureaucracy & other mistakes
This may surprise a few people who I haven’t really talked to in-depth about the issue, but I am not a four year college graduate.
I graduated with an associate’s degree from Houston Community College in 2005. I attended a University in Houston, which may or may not have involved red colors and cougars. When I transferred in, I was under the impression that my associates degree took care of all the lower-level prerequisites, meaning I’d only have to deal with upper level courses. I found out at the end of my first semester at the college that I was missing four credits: beginning and intermediate foreign language. I tried to take Latin with the help of a friend that next semester, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t an easy enough language for me to pickup on my own without immense tutorial help. There’s one semester down the drain.
I immediately went to summer school at HCC to pick up my first two credits. I wound up picking Spanish, because it was what I had some familiarity with in high school, although that was mostly gone. Those credits were not easy for me to earn. When I give my full effort and get immersed in something, I’m terrific at picking it up. When it’s something I actually don’t care about (like learning a foreign language), I am not quite so good, no matter how many hours I put in.
So, I go back to this certain University in Houston, and try to deal with 2301. Maybe it was the instructor, or maybe it was the material, but I could never get settled in the class. I felt completely overwhelmed and dropped it. I go back to summer school at this certain University, and quickly figure out why. The first words spoken in this class, by our blunt teacher, were that if we were transferring in credits, we might be behind by “a month or two” on the material. A month or two? Wow. I get home, crunch the numbers and hours, and it turns out that the only way to pass this course would be to spend about 6-8 hours a day on it. No wonder I felt so far behind in the courses. I went into what I thought would be my last semester of college pulling 4 classes, working as an editorial assistant for Gulf Coast magazine, and also interning for Football Outsiders. Something would get the short end of the stick, and that something was the Spanish. I wasn’t going to graduate on time.
Last year was just a disaster of circumstances and setbacks. My mother was in the hospital for heart (read: smoking) related circumstances on four separate occasions, the first of which was a heart attack. Not only would I have to pick up the slack at the home, but I’d also unsuccessfully try to get real jobs in my field with my associate’s degree and the worst job market in modern history. I tried to teach myself on the side and that didn’t really work due to distractions and my general lack of interest. I can get into it for a month or so, but I haven’t been able to STAY interested in it.
So, in a moment of self-defeat, I strolled over to said University last week for a talk with the counselor. After moving my “degree plan” to the “new degree plan” since I had been absent from the campus for a year, they proceeded to inform me that my first year Spanish credentials no longer counted because they’d been taken 3 years ago, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d need to take the Spanish placement test before I could take a class again. The counselor was very soft-spoken about this, and my realization in this conversation played out like this:
Me: “So you’re saying that you won’t count my credits.”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “And that I have to take the placement test that I was going to try and take anyway.”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “So basically, you’re telling me that it makes much more sense to try to do good on the placement test then it is to go in unprepared to it and potentially end up in a class below where I should be.”
Him: “Uh huh, but…”
Me: “So I should just be trying to nail the placement test then, so I potentially have less classes to take. Costing the University money in the process.”
Him: “Well I guess you could say that, yeah.”
Me: “That’s pretty stupid.”
Him: “Yep.”
I’m not saying that I didn’t earn this trouble. I had some odd circumstances, sure, but I should’ve confronted this earlier. I guess I just feel sort of drained by the whole scenario, how much bureaucracy and effort have gone into forcing me away from the college and into trying to test out of things. I wish there was an easier way out of this, I really do. I just want the damn piece of paper, and to get it, I feel like I have to become an actor. An actor who really cares about learning Spanish.
