Academic Advisers

This will be my lone crying blog. If there is one thing this school has completely let me down on, its the academic advising staff. Up until this year I had scheduled all my classes on my own and figured out what I required on my own. I never visited my communication adviser until the beginning of my senior year here at Ohio State. Most of my friends felt I was crazy for not checking in at least once a quarter but I am a very independent person and like to handle my problems on my own if at all possible.

As it turned out I did a pretty damn good job of staying on top of what I needed to schedule and staying relatively on time. These days not many students make it through a school that runs the quarters system in four years but I am one of them….or am I?

After three years of avoiding the advising staff I finally went in to clear some up some muddles I had. Firstly, I had joined the school of communication in Winter of 2006, however I was required to fulfill the requirements of a student that joined in Spring of 2006, after there were some academic changes. It took a screaming match to actually get one of the advisers to look and see that I was under the wrong requirements and I finally got that changed.

So after that problem I became suspicious of the competency of the staff and continually checked upon things. Recently they placed a course I took under the wrong requirement and insisted I would have to return for Autumn quarter to complete that requirement. Of course all they had to do was move that class out of my general academic credit dog pile and put it in the integrated communication requirement.

Then they tried to convince me I needed another language course even though I have taken four and do not need anymore. They were so stubborn about this that I had to go above their head and have an Arts and Sciences adviser look and see that I was in fact, correct.

In summary, going to the communication advisers office here is an enormous pain in the ass and I equate it to a visit to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. I had better luck on my own and probably would have been out of here by the end of Spring quarter if I hadn’t actually consulted them for help.