Transfer Credits

I *know* red­cub and cybr­cat can commiserate.

The per­son who eval­u­ates trans­fer cred­its at SPSU has been out sick for much of the last week. The one time I reached her, she said the last time she had what­ev­er it is she has now, she end­ed up with pleurisy. This is not hap­py news. I feel self­ish for even being annoyed with her, as she must be real­ly miserable.

But today SOME of my cred­its did show up on my aca­d­e­m­ic tran­script as dis­played on their web sys­tem. 30 hours—exactly enough to qual­i­fy me for the Hope grant. I should be grate­ful, but I’m real­ly con­fused as to how she chose which cred­its to give me.

I got cred­it for an Eng­lish class at Agnes Scott that nobody else has ever giv­en any­thing for, because it was one quar­ter of a three-quar­ter class. I did­n’t get cred­it for tak­ing pre­cal­cu­lus there, though it was a one-quar­ter course. In fact, there’s a note say­ing that I need to sub­mit a descrip­tion of that class. How con­fus­ing is “pre­cal­cu­lus,” which is what shows on the tran­script from Agnes Scott? And why is French II shown as French I? I have cred­it for tak­ing voice there, although there’s no equiv­a­lent as SPSU has no music depart­ment (that real­ly sucks, and is one of the few things I real­ly don’t like about this school).

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, the science/culture hon­ors sem­i­nar at ASC does­n’t show up at all.

She skipped cred­it for the reli­gion, account­ing, and eco­nom­ics class­es I took at Mer­cer. The account­ing and eco­nom­ics class­es def­i­nite­ly have SPSU equiv­a­lents, though unsur­pris­ing­ly they don’t offer “New Tes­ta­ment as Lit­er­a­ture.” She gave me cred­it for a two-hour com­mu­ni­ca­tions class that was all about trans­ac­tion­al analy­sis and con­sen­sus deci­sion mak­ing, though it has absolute­ly no equiv­a­lent at SPSU.

I got cred­it for account­ing II and a math course tak­en at (what is now) Perime­ter Col­lege, as well as polit­i­cal sci­ence 101, psy­chol­o­gy 101, Span­ish 101, and 6 hours of PE. Biol­o­gy 101, though, is nowhere to be seen. And of course, that’s one that would actu­al­ly ful­fill a core cur­ricu­lum require­ment. Is that why I did­n’t get cred­it for it?

Look­ing over this stuff, most of it counts in areas that aren’t too important—but I expect­ed that. The account­ing cours­es more than paid for them­selves in the jobs I’ve been able to hold over the years because of them, anyway.

Anyway—my finan­cial aid is wait­ing only on the aca­d­e­m­ic tran­script stuff now, accord­ing to the web inter­face. So I’m sor­ta won­der­ing when the lady will be done.

I’m going to try to get an appoint­ment with my advi­sor (I have one, and he’s the head of the depart­ment!) to dis­cuss some of these require­ments. Two hours of pub­lic speaking—hello? Could I just turn in some of the video­tapes of the TV inter­views I’ve done? “Soci­ety and Tech­nol­o­gy Sem­i­nar” is required of every­one, and sounds like some­body’s pet project to me. It’s an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary class. Then there’s the “intro­duc­tion to com­put­er con­cepts.” I can’t take any oth­er com­put­er cours­es until I pay to have some­one tell me the dif­fer­ence between hard­ware and software.

At least the first tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions class IS being offered, and IS still open right now—as a web-based course! Yay!