68 days before - Holds

Hi everyone! In today's blog, I plan to tell you why the bureaucracy of BGSU makes me want to kill small animals.

So first, a bit of background. BGSU's money from tuition and so on is handled by what they call the Bursar Department. And . . . they suck. Like, a lot. They are completely incompetent at handling money and, just in general, doing their job. The Bursar Department also has the power to place holds on your account if there is a late payment. These holds can render you unable to register for classes, see grades, buy stuff, and graduate, so it's naturally important to take care of them right away.

Here are some examples at the general incompetence of the Bursar in this particular area:

1) My sister received an email stating that a hold would be placed on her account if they did not receive a payment by the 25th of the month. When did she receive said email? The 26th.

2) A hold was placed on my account because of a late payment. I made said payment, at which point I received an email informing me that the hold would be removed within two business days. Two business days pass . . . nothing. Two weeks pass . . . nothing. I send an email basically telling the Bursar to stop sucking and remove the hold . . . nothing. Finally, I call. I ask someone to check into the matter. His response was something like . . . "Oh yeah . . . I guess we should take care of that." YA THINK?!?!?

3) A hold once stayed on my account for a year. No joke. A full year. This was not, fortunately, a hold that kept me from registering for classes, but it did keep me from using my account to purchase my textbooks. Now this was fairly late in my college career when I had already dealt with the hold described in item 2, so I thought, "Okay, let's see how long it takes them to remove the hold if I don't contact them . . . since I really shouldn't have to." I found out.

Okay, so why am I bringing this up now? Well, because I am going to the same institution for graduate school as I did for college . . . and I've already run into trouble.

So, I received an email from the secretary at the College of Musical Arts, who has been sending me information periodically regarding things I need to take care of before grad school starts. This email informed be that during GradSTEP, the week of seminars and classes I will need to attend before the semester begins, I will need to get a photo ID. Before I can get a photo ID, I'll have to be registered for at least an hour of classes. But before I can register for classes, I will need to meet with an academic advisor . . . which I will be doing during . . . GradSTEP.

. . .

I won't get into the stupidity of all that. They're solution is to have me register only for GradSTEP itself, which is technically a class, and that will qualify me for the photo ID. So I went in to do this, discovering along the way that the entire process of registering for classes has changed since I was an undergrad, but I figured it out, got to the final step, and then received a notification.

I had a hold on my account.

You can probably guess my reaction. As it turns out, though, it was (for once) not the Bursar Department's fault, but the CMA's. During my last semester of classes, they placed that hold there. Why? Because I was student teaching that semester, and their policy during the student teaching semester is that no other classes be taken, so they don't actually let you register that semester . . . and place a hold on your account to make sure that you don't. And since I graduated after student teaching, they just never bothered to remove it.

But they have now. So once I'm done typing this, I will go register for GradSTEP. So all is well.

For now.

-Matt