Pennsylvania
I transferred from a two year college in California to a 4 year university in a major city on the Eastern Seaboard with a reasonably well-known name last fall(2008) with a respectable GPA of 3.3 with approximately 73 units completed and 60 transferred. The school, of course, painted a rosy picture of the area, despite giving little to no transition information and even less transitional assistance.
After being accepted, I tried several times to fill out a required online orientation course from this school, which advertised itself as being one of the nations "most connected campuses" or some such bs, which of course was required to register online for courses. Finally after a great deal of frustration, several phone calls to inept and ignorant student workers in its orientation office(which should have hinted me about the problems which were to come), I was told that I would have to wait until I got to the campus before I could take an in person orientation class, which meant that I couldn't pre-register for any of the classes I wanted, despite making the deadlines for many of the filing requirements.
I had also applied for student housing, and my deposit for said housing was taken, despite the fact that they had neglected to point out in any of their transfer student literature that transfer students who were not freshmen would not be getting student housing, which I found out in a letter that I got in the mail shortly before the semester was to begin, along with the return of my deposit.
Scrambling to find housing, I hurriedly found a place using craigslist. Having never been to the city in question, I settled on an affordable room for rent that was near a subway line that by appearance, seemed to service the university well. With no real transition assistance from the school, nobody giving me any information that I didn’t have to practically work out of them at gunpoint, I began preparing for my relocation and the upcoming year. I had saved approximately $4000 worth of cash from working insane hours at my job before my relocation(which attributed to the marginally lower GPA, and the first semester that I didn’t make Honors and the president’s list before my transfer) and had contracted with a moving company to move across the country. My moving company cheated me (but that is another story) and I ended up in Philadelphia with very little money and only about half of my belongings (notably a lot less electrical items).
I finally arrived in the city and at the school a month before the semester was to start. With little to no money after my moving experience, I was again scrambling, this time to get a job, and to finish my requirements for getting into classes. Because I had to wait until showing up at campus to take an orientation class, I was stuck with horrible classes and an even worse schedule which did nothing to help me in acquiring a job. After some time and starting classes, I finally found a job that would help me to survive, a bartending job at a local bar near my house. This did not last long however, as one day 3 weeks into my working there, an individual was stabbed in the neck with a beer bottle, and business after that would sharply drop off. The owner was forced to let me go as a result of the drop in business, and I was again jobless and scrounging for the money it took to get to and from classes on the subway.
My attendance by this time only marginally suffered, and I was able to find a job about a month later working as a doorman and security at a local establishment that was just off the campus where I went to school. However, I would find out that there was no subway service at night when I got off work, and I would be forced, in order to both survive and to make it to classes at all, to find a way to get to and from work, which often had me out until 4 am just trying to get home after getting off at 2:30am. With classes at 8:00am, my attendance suffered at times simply because I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed after walking for so long at night. Suffering from severe depression (as has been diagnosed since), it took all the energy I could muster to pull myself out of the situation, and to find an apartment closer to campus, which I did approximately halfway through the semester. Unfortunately, another thing that wasn’t in the brochure when I enrolled in this University was the fact that it was located in the middle of an area that was EXTREMELY heavy in crime and gang activity.
While at work, I would receive death threats daily from criminal elements that didn’t appreciate me curbing their activities in my workplace, be exposed to the same dangerous elements while walking the streets, both on and off campus, a campus where for the past two years in a row, an individual was shot on the first day of freshmen orientation, with the first victim in 2008 being a security guard posted for the campus, and the second victim in 2009 being a student. Both incidents, while greatly talked about among the students, never made it into the newspapers of the area. In truth, fear for personal safety is a common element in many of the group conversations of the students at this university.
With nobody in the area that I knew, and pressure to maintain my job or starve, I forced myself, while attending classes and dealing with all of the violence, hostility and death around me, to maintain my composure, and to be a symbol of strength in the job where it was literally my job requirement to do so. I was routinely patting people down at my job and having to turn them away for having firearms on them, many of them making both threats and threatening gestures towards me for the “disrespect” I was showing them by doing what was my job.
Having been a former aircraft mechanic, I am a bit hard of hearing. Being unable to often hear my Japanese instructor, I would often have difficulty in understanding the soft tones of her voice, and miss many parts of lessons simply because I felt ashamed to even point out the fact that I couldn’t hear her. I mentioned it once or twice outside of class, and she did make an effort to be heard, but there were still many times in which I simply could not hear what was being said. And with little sleep to go with this, many of my classes suffered as a result, even if I did wake up in time to attend them, I would find little time to complete the homework that they required, which with the accounting and math classes, were often a daily thing.
By the end of the semester, I felt like I had walked through a minefield and hit every mine in it. Trying to get help from anyone who was in an administrative job netted no results. My advisor, when I could figure out which one was mine, as they had changed during the semester, would not schedule walkins, the office told me I had to make appointments online, my computer at home would simply not access the school’s ridiculously intricate online system, which often required 3-4 passwords to access even the basic functions, and I had no time to use the school’s computers because my job, and life simply required me to be elsewhere. I was literally in chaos.
As a result, I decided to take the following semester off, in order to refocus myself and prepare to start again with a clean slate in the following fall semester, which I am now just completing. However, with a final GPA for the semester of 0.97 (remarkably with an A in one of my classes, which was the only one which didn’t have some form of scheduling conflict with my life), I was obviously a bit distraught. I eventually began counseling through the Department of Veteran’s Affairs for this and other issues in my life and have been since, although in the past month, I’ve been forced through my schedule to miss a few appointments.
Meanwhile, I looked for avenues in which I could address this with the school, but each time I tried to go through any one of these avenues, I was cut off by ignorant office staffers who simply had no grasp for the jobs which they held, much less a concern for any of my problems. They would lead me down rabbit holes, waste hours of my time sitting in waiting rooms, send me to offices which no longer existed, or had never existed, and many other ridiculous things. After so much of this, I finally worked out two avenues in which I could possibly resolve the situation, one being an excused withdrawal for the credits, and the other being an exception to the credit policy.
The excused withdrawal I didn’t feel that I had any grounds for, because I was hesitant to admit depression because of the social stigma around it, and I had not worked at my original bartending job for long enough to be put on the books as an employee, despite filling out a W-4(when I went back to get a W-2 for tax purposes, they had no records for me, and only a few remembered me having ever worked there). The exemption to the policy seemed more reasonable, and I thought that I might have a chance with it to work the grades into non-existence.
I had filled out my FAFSA for the next year(2009-10) and was waiting on the decision to come back from the board that decided upon the policy. I would receive a letter, unsigned by anyone other than “Exemption whatever board”(have the document somewhere), denying my request for review of credits. I was further told that I would be denied my financial aid by the school, despite having my fafsa accepted by the government. Very angry, I went back to my advisor’s office where the form originated. He directed me to Financial Aid, where a particularly ignorant worker made me sit angrily for two hours before being told that the decision was final and I could do nothing about it.
I transferred from a two year college in California to a 4 year university in a major city on the Eastern Seaboard with a reasonably well-known name last fall(2008) with a respectable GPA of 3.3 with approximately 73 units completed and 60 transferred. The school, of course, painted a rosy picture of the area, despite giving little to no transition information and even less transitional assistance.
After being accepted, I tried several times to fill out a required online orientation course from this school, which advertised itself as being one of the nations "most connected campuses" or some such bs, which of course was required to register online for courses. Finally after a great deal of frustration, several phone calls to inept and ignorant student workers in its orientation office(which should have hinted me about the problems which were to come), I was told that I would have to wait until I got to the campus before I could take an in person orientation class, which meant that I couldn't pre-register for any of the classes I wanted, despite making the deadlines for many of the filing requirements.
I had also applied for student housing, and my deposit for said housing was taken, despite the fact that they had neglected to point out in any of their transfer student literature that transfer students who were not freshmen would not be getting student housing, which I found out in a letter that I got in the mail shortly before the semester was to begin, along with the return of my deposit.
Scrambling to find housing, I hurriedly found a place using craigslist. Having never been to the city in question, I settled on an affordable room for rent that was near a subway line that by appearance, seemed to service the university well. With no real transition assistance from the school, nobody giving me any information that I didn’t have to practically work out of them at gunpoint, I began preparing for my relocation and the upcoming year. I had saved approximately $4000 worth of cash from working insane hours at my job before my relocation(which attributed to the marginally lower GPA, and the first semester that I didn’t make Honors and the president’s list before my transfer) and had contracted with a moving company to move across the country. My moving company cheated me (but that is another story) and I ended up in Philadelphia with very little money and only about half of my belongings (notably a lot less electrical items).
I finally arrived in the city and at the school a month before the semester was to start. With little to no money after my moving experience, I was again scrambling, this time to get a job, and to finish my requirements for getting into classes. Because I had to wait until showing up at campus to take an orientation class, I was stuck with horrible classes and an even worse schedule which did nothing to help me in acquiring a job. After some time and starting classes, I finally found a job that would help me to survive, a bartending job at a local bar near my house. This did not last long however, as one day 3 weeks into my working there, an individual was stabbed in the neck with a beer bottle, and business after that would sharply drop off. The owner was forced to let me go as a result of the drop in business, and I was again jobless and scrounging for the money it took to get to and from classes on the subway.
My attendance by this time only marginally suffered, and I was able to find a job about a month later working as a doorman and security at a local establishment that was just off the campus where I went to school. However, I would find out that there was no subway service at night when I got off work, and I would be forced, in order to both survive and to make it to classes at all, to find a way to get to and from work, which often had me out until 4 am just trying to get home after getting off at 2:30am. With classes at 8:00am, my attendance suffered at times simply because I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed after walking for so long at night. Suffering from severe depression (as has been diagnosed since), it took all the energy I could muster to pull myself out of the situation, and to find an apartment closer to campus, which I did approximately halfway through the semester. Unfortunately, another thing that wasn’t in the brochure when I enrolled in this University was the fact that it was located in the middle of an area that was EXTREMELY heavy in crime and gang activity.
While at work, I would receive death threats daily from criminal elements that didn’t appreciate me curbing their activities in my workplace, be exposed to the same dangerous elements while walking the streets, both on and off campus, a campus where for the past two years in a row, an individual was shot on the first day of freshmen orientation, with the first victim in 2008 being a security guard posted for the campus, and the second victim in 2009 being a student. Both incidents, while greatly talked about among the students, never made it into the newspapers of the area. In truth, fear for personal safety is a common element in many of the group conversations of the students at this university.
With nobody in the area that I knew, and pressure to maintain my job or starve, I forced myself, while attending classes and dealing with all of the violence, hostility and death around me, to maintain my composure, and to be a symbol of strength in the job where it was literally my job requirement to do so. I was routinely patting people down at my job and having to turn them away for having firearms on them, many of them making both threats and threatening gestures towards me for the “disrespect” I was showing them by doing what was my job.
Having been a former aircraft mechanic, I am a bit hard of hearing. Being unable to often hear my Japanese instructor, I would often have difficulty in understanding the soft tones of her voice, and miss many parts of lessons simply because I felt ashamed to even point out the fact that I couldn’t hear her. I mentioned it once or twice outside of class, and she did make an effort to be heard, but there were still many times in which I simply could not hear what was being said. And with little sleep to go with this, many of my classes suffered as a result, even if I did wake up in time to attend them, I would find little time to complete the homework that they required, which with the accounting and math classes, were often a daily thing.
By the end of the semester, I felt like I had walked through a minefield and hit every mine in it. Trying to get help from anyone who was in an administrative job netted no results. My advisor, when I could figure out which one was mine, as they had changed during the semester, would not schedule walkins, the office told me I had to make appointments online, my computer at home would simply not access the school’s ridiculously intricate online system, which often required 3-4 passwords to access even the basic functions, and I had no time to use the school’s computers because my job, and life simply required me to be elsewhere. I was literally in chaos.
As a result, I decided to take the following semester off, in order to refocus myself and prepare to start again with a clean slate in the following fall semester, which I am now just completing. However, with a final GPA for the semester of 0.97 (remarkably with an A in one of my classes, which was the only one which didn’t have some form of scheduling conflict with my life), I was obviously a bit distraught. I eventually began counseling through the Department of Veteran’s Affairs for this and other issues in my life and have been since, although in the past month, I’ve been forced through my schedule to miss a few appointments.
Meanwhile, I looked for avenues in which I could address this with the school, but each time I tried to go through any one of these avenues, I was cut off by ignorant office staffers who simply had no grasp for the jobs which they held, much less a concern for any of my problems. They would lead me down rabbit holes, waste hours of my time sitting in waiting rooms, send me to offices which no longer existed, or had never existed, and many other ridiculous things. After so much of this, I finally worked out two avenues in which I could possibly resolve the situation, one being an excused withdrawal for the credits, and the other being an exception to the credit policy.
The excused withdrawal I didn’t feel that I had any grounds for, because I was hesitant to admit depression because of the social stigma around it, and I had not worked at my original bartending job for long enough to be put on the books as an employee, despite filling out a W-4(when I went back to get a W-2 for tax purposes, they had no records for me, and only a few remembered me having ever worked there). The exemption to the policy seemed more reasonable, and I thought that I might have a chance with it to work the grades into non-existence.
I had filled out my FAFSA for the next year(2009-10) and was waiting on the decision to come back from the board that decided upon the policy. I would receive a letter, unsigned by anyone other than “Exemption whatever board”(have the document somewhere), denying my request for review of credits. I was further told that I would be denied my financial aid by the school, despite having my fafsa accepted by the government. Very angry, I went back to my advisor’s office where the form originated. He directed me to Financial Aid, where a particularly ignorant worker made me sit angrily for two hours before being told that the decision was final and I could do nothing about it.
