Thursday, February 22, 2007

Academic Scare

This was not the right day for a sudden high dose of stress, but I guess bad news never comes at convenient times.

The second floor of our house is a complete chaos right now. OK, it's not that bad because I have already put away most books, but it's pretty messy. My parents arrive tomorrow from Brazil and we're moving the boys to the tiny room that used to be our study. However, we decided to paint that little room (a very pale and pretty shade of blue -- I'll post photos later) before moving, so we had to empty it fully. We went to bed at 2 a.m. last night after moving the computer desk and one of the bookshelves to our bedroom and we got up at 7 with the boys and resumed the moving. All the furniture is moved, that is, except for the boy's beds which are piled into our bedroom awaiting the room to be painted.

So... lo and behold, I open the mail and find a letter from the graduate registrar saying that since I'd failed to register for the Spring semester, my status as a student had been TERMINATED!! "What??" I thought, "I registered in December!" Well, at least I thought I did, but most certainly didn't. Termination simply can't happen, both because this is my very last semester and that I need to be registered in order to maintain my visa status.

Well, don't worry... (like I uselessly did). I have already called the chair of my program and he's hand delivering a memo authorizing the graduate school to reinstate me this afternoon. I already called the graduate school and they have my credit card information, which will be used as soon as they get the said memo.

Problem's solved, then. It just cost me a huge dose of adrenaline and 75 dollars more than my "program fee" [continuous enrollment fee] (insert big heaving sigh here)...

3 comments:

Aliki2006 said...

Oh no! This happened to me two semesters ago--it was awful. It took me much longer to get my registration accepted again, though--I don't have the responsible chair you have...

Juliet said...

Wow! Close one! I would have been freaked out, too. Good thing it all worked out in the end!

Alice said...

That's a big scare!! You know what's funny, I had something very similar happen to me. I had to go through this enormous bureaucratic process to get it fixed, as you said, it cost a lot of nerves (and money) ...