A Hard Earned Education
09/10/13 08:42 PM
When I left NYIT after nearly twenty-five years of teaching college students how to be television news reporters, the sad end of an era came with an unexpected perk: free college classes for life! And this year, I decided to take the school up on its offer.
It wasn’t as easy as I thought. I needed a signed form from Human Resources approving me for tuition remission. Once I found the course I wanted to take, Drawing 1, I found out I needed a signed form from the department chair saying I was approved to take that class. But there was no chair at the time, so I had to get the permission of the temporary chair. A flurry of emails ensued. He said, “no problem,” but I dragged my feet. It was early summer and I thought I had plenty of time. A month later, when I actually visited the school to have the form signed, I found out there was a new chair and I would need her signature. There was another flurry of emails. Finally, I had her signature in hand, and drove to the campus registrar to finish signing up. That’s when I discovered I needed to go to admissions and be admitted as a student first, because I needed a student ID number. When I got back to the registrar, I learned I couldn’t sign up until I either submitted my MMR form or had it waived. Once that was done, I found out I still had to go to the Bursar, even though my class was free, to submit my tuition remission form. That’s when I learned every student pays a fee for tuition insurance, but since I wasn’t paying tuition, I needed to have my fee waived, or it would cost me $40. for insurancee I didn’t need. Another flurry of emails. I couldn’t get that waiver until I had a school email account, but my student email account wouldn’t work, because I was still in the system as a staff member from my nearly twenty-five years of teaching college students how to be television news reporters.
My students used to complain about how difficult it was to sign up for an internship in our program, but I figured they were just being histrionic and blowing everything out of proportion. Duh!
Anyway, this morning was my first time back at school as a student. I received my BA and my MA at NYIT, so it should have felt like old times, but it didn’t. It felt foreign to me and I realized it’s much easier to be the professor than the student.
Although, I must admit, I never thought that, when I was the professor.