I have complained about the Stevens Registrar many times in the past, but this week they really, really let me down.
I am a graduating senior. This means that I have to formalize my study plan into a presentable “Application for Candidacy.” In it, I have to keep track of every class I took, when I took them, what grades I got, and how they are classified to meet my requirements.
Luckily, your unofficial transcript has a lot of this information already displayed for you, and if you’ve been meeting regularly with your academic advisors (which you should all be doing), you should have them correctly placed every semester.
Now, that said, I got an email last semester before midterms from the Stevens Registrar stating that I needed to submit my Application for Candidacy. This was a bit silly – the Application for Candidacy is intended to be a final draft, and because I still had one unscheduled semester, this didn’t make much sense to me. Needless to say, I submitted it with the help of my academic advisor, and life went on.
Until of course I got an email from the Registrar stating that my Application for Candidacy was not accepted because I had not yet completed the Fall or Spring semesters. Ok, fine. Sure, after I finished the semester last December, I resubmitted it with the grades, and everything was good.
And then I got an email stating that I am clear for graduation – except that I wasn’t because the Application for Candidacy that they approved they had told me just the week before was invalid because I withdrew from a class (one of my additional classes).
So, as per the Registrar’s orders, I began to update my Application for Candidacy only to realize that the new Application for Candidacy form, which apparently is the result of the new website (it was not very clear) calls out for more classes than I took.
And so, the nightmarish cycle of incompetency continues.
I discovered on Tuesday that many of my fellow Civil Engineers are in the same boat. I haven’t heard of one Graduate Application for Candidacy (for Civil Engineering) going through, though to be fair I only asked one class worth of students, and a good number of my friends are experiencing the same “extra class” issue on the Undergraduate Application for Candidacy.
I know the workers there are stressed out and dislike their current setup, but c’mon. There has got to be a better way to organize yourselves, and the people above them should actively be listening to make this experience a better one for both parties. I don’t know how it works in other schools, but my experiences with the Registrar have pretty much been the absolute worst out of any organization on campus, and gosh I’ve had some bad experiences.
To be entirely fair, this issue won’t exist in the same capacity in the future – I have knowledge that the Registrar is migrating all of their data (and have been for a good number of months) to a new online system that will be formally rolled out in 2017. However, until then, we have to deal with a handful of people who all use post-it notes and white boards to keep tabs on each issue they need to take care of.
Man, this is my tuition at work… I can’t wait to get out of here – so long as the Stevens Registrar says I can in fact graduate!!
