Quietly excited :)
We were back at SUNY Purchase this afternoon to register Cris for classes as she has been officially cleared to return for the fall semester!
She will restart as a freshman, so it will basically be as if the last year was a gap year- except that she took some courses at WCC and should have 9 more credits to transfer in to add to the 4 she got in high school for a total of 13 🙂
It is a pretty dumb system that they have, as all the other incoming freshmen started registering for classes back in May, but the college has a rule that you can’t submit any paperwork to return from medical leave until July 15, so by this point most of the classes are full. We met with an adviser today and none of the classes that Cris was interested in were available, all that was left were things like The Influence of Dance on Brazilian Cultural Diversity (OK, that’s made up- but it’s not far off what she was offered). Cris was unhappy enough that she actually suggested that she skip this semester and restart in the spring instead. They were trying to make it sound OK by saying that anything she took would count towards her requirements for graduation, but that’s not really very helpful for a kid who is anxious about returning already and who we had told to just take courses that sound fun for her first semester to ease her back into college life 🙁
I’m glad I went along with her because I got a little pushy and started questioning the way they have this set up and why it is done this way. I was not rude, but I made it clear that this is not a helpful way to have someone return from a medical leave. They told us that she could just pick any classes and then put herself on the wait-list for the classes she really wanted and she might be lucky and places might open up- I threw “might” right back at them.
In the end the adviser we were talking to went off to talk to someone else and they both came back about 20 minutes later with what is actually quite a nice mix of classes that were either not shown in the regular course catalog or where they had overidden the number of places to make room, It is not perfect but it is a lot better than what we were offered start with, and Cris got quite excited about most of it!
So, she is now registered as “Undeclared” and this semester she will be taking:
First Year Seminar (all freshmen take this- it’s an hour a week with their adviser)
Introduction to Environmental Science (she wanted to keep some kind of science)
Development of the United States II (a history course- the II denotes the later part of US history. She’s not thrilled about this and it’s the first one she will drop if something on the wait-list opens up)
Introduction to Media (not to be confused with Intro to Media Studies she took last time, this is a journalism course that actually sounds quite fun)
Photography I: Camera to Darkroom (old school photography with film! I’m very jealous)
And she is wait-listed for:
Introduction to Creative Writing (this is the one she really wants- fingers crossed!)
College Writing (she took this last time and was quite enjoying it)
We stopped on the way out and picked up her new school ID and tried to get her parking pass (they won’t hand those out ’til August) and also found out that she will not have to go through the second part of orientation again (the first part was last week), she can just quietly show up on the first day of classes- just the way she wants it 🙂