For all that I love school, my post-secondary education has truly been fraught with one disaster after another. Honestly, if it could go wrong it’s most likely happened to me.

So, when I say that this semester is proving to be a fucking nightmare of epic proportions, I want you to take my full meaning. Let’s just say, I am hardly fazed when I get a bill for tuition I’ve already paid or see I was double charged for my books or I’m hours away from classes starting and I’m still not officially in the course. Those kinds of things frustrate me, I admit, but they happen so often I almost don’t believe the semester has started unless something has gone wrong.

I’ve been shut out of registration for weeks at a time when I should have had the earliest chance to get into a class because my entrance exam that I had received results from in the mail was never recorded into the system. I had a hold on my records for a $600 phone bill that was charged solely because somehow the area code wasn’t input into my home phone and so it wasn’t considered my exempt permanent address’s number. You might remember that entire semester of courses I took in the Rehabilitation Counseling degree only to find out a semester later I’d been told by my advisor to take the wrong courses and was effectively shut out of my program for an entire year even though I had a 4.0!

I even walked across the stage to get my bachelor’s degree, only to get an envelope a week later declaring my lack of degree because I had allegedly not completed the required internship necessary for my program. Considering the internship I had worked actually was for double the credits needed since it also was being used for my minor, you can understand my confusion. The best part of that letter was the bottom, which proclaimed how dire the situation might be in all caps by stating that since I wasn’t registered for the next semester, graduation requirements had changed and completing the above list would not necessarily net me my degree.

Suffice it to say all the turmoil I’ve dealt with before pales in comparison to what I’ve been dealing with for the last month. Honestly, if I get through this semester with even a fraction of my sanity intact, I think the school should just give me my degree. What’s going on you ask? Well, I literally have no idea! Every office tells me something different and on almost a daily basis I receive mail that contradicts at least half of what I’ve been told. In short, I’ve paid for a semester of classes that I very well may not be enrolled in. It’s such a ridiculous mess that if it weren’t actually happening to me I would swear it couldn’t be possible.