You would never study engineering in a university where the buildings were falling down and you would never study chemistry in a place where the professors kept blowing up the labs. I would not have chosen Haskayne if I had any idea how bad this university’s School of Business is at management.
Let me take a moment to admit a bias: Haskayne recently shot me in the foot. Figuratively speaking, naturally, but even figuratively it is not the sort of professional practice that I had hoped to learn.
Red tape is a fact of life — especially my life. I once had to get permission from three layers of people in order to shred a photocopy of a document that was going to remain available in original and scanned forms. But that was neither here nor there. The trouble here came because the tape was invisible.
My mistake was being nerdy: I registered for six courses. At first, all was well. I filled out an overload request, which was approved. The courses all appeared in my Student Centre, and my tuition fees increased to reflect the changes.
Suddenly one of my other courses disappeared. You know the one, the required course in such high demand that it was full on the first day of registration? The one where you waited for the second the clock ticked over to your enrolment appointment just to make sure you would get in?
Apparently Haskayne likes to remove people from high-demand courses without telling them.
An employee of Haskayne’s Registration Office told me that I am not the only one. No, they do this to so many students that sending notification would be prohibitively time consuming. She also said that there just are not enough spaces to ever accommodate overload requests and that I should not have registered for six courses.
If there are not enough spaces, I propose that the easiest solution might be to make it possible for commerce students to actually graduate in four years, rather than the current average of 5.3. Course requirements should actually be offered every year so that students are not forced to stick around filling up class spaces and waiting for that one last course to finally show up on the list. Allowing students to take sixth courses from other departments would not cost Haskayne a dime. Apparently business strategy is not one of Haskayne’s strong points, either.
Before this week I did not understand why so many students on campus look on the corporate world with suspicion and distrust. Now I finally understand that it is because Haskayne, campus representative of the corporate world, does not know how to do its job.