Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash
"From nursery to primary school, secondary school to university. I have finally completed my 20+ year long tutorial of life." Those were my thoughts when I completed and presented my final year project in university and wrote the last of my degree examinations. How unfortunate was I when I found out that there is still more to the school struggle left for me.
After four very long years, I had finally finished all that I had to do in university, and I was on my way to prepare for my final clearance within the university. But before I did that, I had to make sure that my name was on the graduation list. I went through it from top to bottom only to make one discovery - My name wasn't on the list! It didn't take me very long to realize the cause of it - my transcript from my previous university had not arrived.
To be honest, I actually expected this to happen. This topic of my transcript had been lurking in my head for a long while, so I actually have no idea why I was so surprised when I didn't find my name on the graduation list back then.
Normally, when transferring from one university of another, it is necessary to request for a copy of your partial academic transcript to be sent from your old university to the new one. I had to do this using a transcript delivery service that I found online.
"Using this service would be a good idea to get my transcript delivered" was what I thought to myself when I found it. I would have opted to go to my previous university by myself to request for it to be delivered, but since I live very far away from the university, it wasn't the best idea. On top of that, my brother and I calculated the costs in case I decided to get there eventually but it just wasn't worth the risk and cost.
First off, I would have to sort out the transport costs, added with the cost of getting a place to stay since I do not have any friends or family living close to the university. Besides, I never moved around much when I was on campus so I didn't know how to find my way around the area.
Coming back to the delivery service, I had to resort to this since it wasn't possible to head to my old university. So I placed an order for the service to request and deliver my academic transcript through electronic means (via email).
I have to admit, I got a bit complacent when I placed an order for it. After placing the order, I didn't even bother to check on it again and assumed that everything will go smoothly. Boy, was I wrong.
After I was done with my degree exams, I realized that the transcript never even arrived in the first place because I put in the wrong email in the website. I was annoyed when I found this out because it was all a waste of money and time at the end.
So I decided to try once more for the email delivery again but I made sure I got the email correctly this time. I even had to head over to the admissions office of my current university to confirm if it was the right one. Now things will go smoothly, right?
Well no, things still went pretty rough. It was received by my current university's registrar, but it wasn't visible when it was printed on paper for some unknown reason. And once again, there goes another sum of cash and time spent on getting to the university and delivery.
Finally, I decided to give it a final shot and order once again but as a physical document this time. There is no way that could be messed up, right? Even if it was, the person processing it could see if it's bad and fix it.
After a while of waiting and prayers, it had finally arrived this time. As soon as I had gotten the notification that it had arrived, I rushed back to the university the next day. When I checked, it was confirmed that it was received by the admissions unit. I was so relieved that it had arrived at the school. But how naïve was I to not realize that this was only the first part of the struggle.
From the admissions office, it then had to be delivered to the department of Computer Science, which is the course I'm studying. This is done to compare the lecture courses that I did in my previous university with those of my current university to see if there are any ones that I'm supposed to do in accordance with the school. How many would I be getting? One? Two? Maybe five courses perhaps? By the time that my department finished going through my transcript, they gave me thirteen courses to take. THIRTEEN!
The worst part is that some of the courses are completely unnecessary in my field of study. I had to do Physics, which makes sense as a Computer Science major. There are also the general courses named Computer Applications, which is basically about the computer basics, and also Logic and Philosophy. These are alright, I guess.
Then, there are the courses that I have no idea why on earth I have to do them because they are not relevant in any way to my course of study. These courses are Biology and Chemistry. The best part is that these courses also have their practical versions too which is just fantastic.
But thankfully, I think the university has changed the Computer Science curriculum so future sets of CS students don't have to worry about learning Biology or Chemistry. Unfortunately, they decided that I have to continue with the old curriculum since I joined the university while it was still in use, so I have to finish with it. Lucky me...
After all these, here I am now, currently in school, reliving the student life that I thought I left behind. This was even part of the reason why I was unable to publish hive posts for a while (I totally wasn't planning on leaving for another month or so 😅). I had a rough start into the semester because as soon as I found out the courses that I should do, I started attending classes the next day. Plus since I started the semester late, I had a lot of catching up to do - I had to get lecture notes from other students, find out what I could do as assignments from the lecturers, get information on what had been done in class and so on.
While I do find all this annoying and I'm trying to readapt the school life of waking up early, setting up study routines and the whole stress of running around the campus just to attend classes or get something done; I still find it to be kind of cool that I'm back here. I remember one time while I was at home, I was wondering what the newer batches of students would look like and being back here has given me the chance to see that. Plus I was also able to become friends with a few of them.
With all that said, I really hope to sort out all these problems by this year and hopefully be done with anything concerning school, for real this time. And hopefully get out of here soon because I really dislike school.
TL;DR - I delayed and made a few mistakes in delivering my transcript to a university that I transferred to, now I'm paying for it by waiting for an extra year and doing courses that are completely irrelevant to my field of study so that I can graduate.
That's everything I have to say. Thank you all for reading, and much love to you all!