Infidel defilers. They will drown in rivers of blood.

[maradydd]

Leave it to the university to wholly derail my cleverly crafted plan for the next year.

Among the piles of accumulated email I had to sort through, there was a note from the department admin stating, "Due to low enrollment, one of the classes you needed for your core requirements has been cancelled." I knew about this two days ago, but figured it was surmountable; UI has started offering more and more classes online, and I figured it wouldn't be too hard to convince them to let me take one last core class remotely from California.

Tonight, I finally got into my account on the scheduling site, and discovered that not just one but both of the classes I needed to knock out the last of my coursework has been cancelled. I can imagine no one signing up for Slonneger's Programming Language Foundations class; the guy's an incompetent asshat and most people only take classes from him when they have no other choice. But Doug Jones was teaching Advanced Operating Systems, which I'm sure was a star attraction. I have no idea what happened, but it is suddenly, mysteriously gone, and with it my plans for moving to SF by the beginning of next year. I could have pulled off one long-distance class and a full-time job. Two will not happen.

So, now I have to figure out what to do with myself this fall. I still have the linear programming class I planned on taking, and I still have a TAship, but there aren't any other classes I'm really interested in. I've heard noises about an independent-study LISP class, so I might just do that and tack on three hours of dissertation research, knock some of that out of the way.

As obstacles go, this certainly isn't the worst I've faced, but it sure is frustrating. I was set on being employed full-time somewhere -- be that IDT in the Bay Area, IDT in Iowa, or something else in the Bay Area -- by January, with coursework a thing of the past, and this is a pretty demoralising turn of events.

Comments

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Merry. That does sound frustrating. :-(

[shkspr13.livejournal.com]

SUCK!!

[mycroftxxx.livejournal.com]

You cannot find someone to torture to make this their problem? I would think that enough poking at someone's bits over the phone could cause things to be changed.

[cloakedwraith.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I'm sorry to hear that, Mer. How do they expect students to meet requirements if they cancel the courses? Are they substituting or making you take them online?

IDT should still be willing to employ you if you have to stay in Iowa a little longer, no?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

There are only two classes which are strict ("no substitutions") core requirements: Computational Theory and Design and Analysis of Algorithms. However, there are three more subject areas in which PhD students must take one of a specified set of courses: for instance, one of Advanced Operating Systems or High Performance Computer Architecture (but not both). However, for next semester they were only offering Advanced OS, not HPCA, and the OS class got cancelled. There was a similar situation with the Programming Language Foundations class -- none of the alternatives were offered. I suspect someone was just being staggeringly clueless; either that, or they figure people will just take one of the two next time one of them is offered.

IDT will happily employ me in Iowa, but I can't work full time and carry a six-hour courseload. My fallback plan if I couldn't afford the move would have been to stay here, transition to a full-time position, and start socking away savings. But there's a huge difference between an $11/hr internship and a $60k developer's job.