Advisor helps degree petition headache

This week I began the wonderfully painful process of submitting my degree petition to graduate in May. So far, it has been little more than a reminder of the many headaches I have gone through during my years at Tech rather than a pleasant trip down memory lane.

Really, I shouldn't have been surprised about the amount of effort and, of course, paperwork that goes into graduating from our esteemed Institute. I understand the need for various departments to keep up with their people, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. There are so many required signatures to obtain-and when was the last time you tracked down a department chair with no trouble whatsoever?

Back when I changed my major sophomore year, the form I had to complete required the signatures of my previous major school and my new major school. Although the rest of the signatures-from the Division of Professional Practice, the Military Science professor, the Veterans' Affairs Coordinator, and the Dean of the Graduate Division-didn't apply to me, that's hypothetically a lot of running around campus just to change your major.

And in the end, the only reason you really need an official change is to have an official advisor, and how many of us really ever see our advisors unless we're not in good academic standing or we're nearing graduation? My school has changed advisors since I've joined it, and I only met with my first advisor when I switched majors and my new advisor to sign my degree petition.

It's not that I have found either one of my advisors to be unapproachable-quite the contrary, actually. I've just never had much need to see them, which I guess could be considered a good thing. But I think that students should remember that their advisors are there for a reason, and while they may not have all the answers, they usually can find the person who does.

Don't just meet your advisor when you're ready to take that last step and submit your degree petition. Stop in to see if you're still on track for graduation, to ask for class recommendations, to find out about research opportunities or just to chat. They're not that scary, I promise.

But back to that degree petition, which I thought would be the most exciting reason for meeting with my advisor. Unfortunately, what could have been a short and relatively painless meeting ended up being an hour and a half of head-scratching frustration because of a discrepancy between Tech's idea of my degree requirements and my College's idea.

The primary source of the problem stems from the fact that my College requires six more hours of free electives than the Institute-and the always misleading CAPP advisement on OSCAR-seems to believe. Because of this discrepancy, I am suddenly required to take yet another class in my major next semester in addition to the lab science requirement I have been putting off since freshman year (much to my mother's frustration, I might add). So although I was already taking my capstone course this semester to make next semester more of a breeze, that no longer seems to be a viable option.

I have never understood this seeming lack of communication between Institute branches, especially since it usually ends with a headache for the student, who should be the most important part of this equation, right? (Although the very word equation is another reminder of the feeling I have had for years, that I'm just another number in the system rather than a name with a face that the system cares about.)

And this student has one more complaint with the petition process-the $25 diploma fee. After four (or five or six or seven) years at Tech, the amount of money that a single student pours into his or her education is absolutely astounding. The diploma fee is just a monetary kick while we're down.

I guess that's just the price you pay to escape. That's not really fair to Tech though, because it's not that it has been nothing but horrible to me. I'm just tired of tests, papers, 8 a.m. lectures and irritating forms accompanied by never-ending rolls of red tape. I can't wait to escape Tech's pesky paperwork.