Wednesday, May 14, 2008

School Woes

This semester is not going as well for me as I would like. I am just hoping to survive the next two weeks and be done with it!

I have two research papers to write and some other things to do as well. I am working on a project for one of my classes that is a "green" or "eco" website. It is kind of a lot of fun. I have done the majority of the work for that class at this point, so I just need to do a little coasting to the end.

For my Native American Studies class, things are not going well. I got a D on a paper, which is completely unlike me, and when I inquired with the professor, she did not get back to me for 2 weeks, and when she did, she told me that she had changed the grade to a C. There is no explanation for the reason that that grade was increased or the reason that the grade was so low.

My only hope with that class is that I get by with a C in the class so that I can walk away from it and find a class where the professor is actually interested in teaching.

In all of this chaos for school, I was not looking very far into the future, and it turns out that I have a few hurdles to jump to make it to graduation.

1.) I got a phone call from the adviser at the school that said that they had decided not to accept 20 of the credits from Greece. The school is not accredited, so they would not accept the credits.

The good news about this is that there is a petitioning process, and the even better news is that I have gone through the process with my other credits from Greece, and they were approved. That gives me a great deal of hope that I will be able to gain the 20 credits back. I just hope that it does not take a long time to do it because I only have 2 semester of school left if these credits are accepted, and I want to make sure that I am taking the right classes (if I take the wrong type of classes, I just have to do them over).

2.) PSU does not give grand money during the summer. The truth is that I have been using my grant money to go to school, and it has worked nicely. However, they do not give grant money during the summer, which means that if I want to take summer classes that I need to pay for them on my own. This is less than thrilling for me, and it means that I will most likely skip the summer to go to school because our financial situation does not allow for me to shell out 2-5 thousand dollars for a semester.

3.) With the decision to not do summer school comes the devastating realization that I will not graduate for another year from now if that is the case. I was planning to finish up Christmas of 2008, but with the summer school not happening, it is more likely going to be June of 2009. It is a devastating blow to me.

4.) And so, I again need to muster the courage to continue on in the face of adversity with school. It would be a very dumb thing indeed to quit now when I have done my senior capstone and fulfilled the requirements for the degree and now all I have to do is just match a "number of credits needed". In truth, no matter how much I don't want to finish, 24 credits away from a 180 credit degree is a really dumb place to stop. I will persevere. I was sure that I would get a college degree, and I promised myself that I would trek on, but a lot of times, I feel like I would rather be investing my time into something else. My future self will thank me, I am sure.

So my To-Do list looks kind of like this

  • Don't fail my current classes
  • Take the summer off
  • Get 24 more credits
  • Have a college diploma!
  • TOUGH IT OUT

1 comment:

Melissa said...

Just think of when you have midwife certification! :)