Dealing with universities

My wife and I are still nosing around university websites thinking about MFAs — creative writing for her, studio art for me.

While I thoroughly enjoyed my college years (and miss them with regularity) dealing with university and college administration was always a nightmare. Transferring credits, changing majors, constantly changing course requirements, scholarship applications: Just about every interaction I had with my advisors, the bursars, the dean or any other administrative type was something I quickly learned to dread. Some of the administration people were just visibly uninterested in your particular problem (and by extension, thus, your education), others were inept and uninformed.

And it wasn’t just me. The girl across the street back home had to send her high school transcript six times to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln; they kept losing it!

We’ve been told over the last month that many people in master’s programs have assistantships, and that these pay not only for your tuition but also a stipend for teaching or research. Looking into this at a potential university we found a frustrating discrepancy on their website.

This isn’t surprising when I remember how much trouble I had as a student, but it is still very annoying. Up until now in our search we hadn’t experienced such a glaring reminder of large institutions’ inability to communicate with clarity and consistency. And it isn’t just universities that commit such egregious communication and administrative faux-pas. Many, if not most, enormous bureaucracies tend to say different things out of the same mouth — even if it’s unintentional.

It makes the whole process of looking for a master’s program less desirable.