Editor,
After a long, frustrating day, my husband asked me, “How was the graduation workshop today?”
“In a nutshell, it was expensive, time-consuming and unnecessary,” I replied. I left this 16-minute “graduation workshop” at the A&S department feeling pretty !*&^n’ peeved.
It all began about a month ago when I noticed a new hold on my LoboWeb page that instructed me to contact the college and arrange to attend a mandatory group workshop on campus.
My first thought was to ask if I could fulfill the workshop requirements via telephone or web because it takes me an hour to get to main campus and because I have to arrange for extra elder care for my 94-year-old mother-in-law. The answer was “no,” and so I arranged to attend the mandatory workshop, otherwise I would be unable to register for classes.
On the appointed day I greeted and oriented the elder care “sitter” and left my home an hour and a half before the workshop because they warned that if you are five minutes late then you have to reschedule — I didn’t want to take that chance! I needed to fill up at the gas station first at $3.30 per gallon. I am very conservative and conscious about gas usage and always try to plan driving trips to “kill two birds.”
I never go to main campus, so I don’t have a parking permit. I did not know what to expect in terms of parking availability, but I found a meter and paid for two hours at $1.75 per hour.
I paid for two hours because I expected that a mandatory (i.e. “big deal”) workshop for graduation would last at least an hour! I had also contracted with the elder care person for four hours that day at $12 per hour (two hours driving one and a half hours negotiating main campus .5 hours of time to orientate the sitter).
I was ready for something substantial to happen, apparently — ha, what a joke (an expensive joke)!
Okay, so I arranged the elder care, got gas, found a parking meter and walked to Mesa Vista Hall, arriving 15 minutes before my workshop appointment. I phoned the sitter — all is well — and waited in the A&S waiting room. The workshop started a little late, but finally the group of about 10 students was called in to a little room that had a projector set up and an adviser present.
She introduced herself briefly, distributed a sign-in sheet, a one-page handout, and fired up the first overhead slide. She instructed the group to refer to the LOBO Trax audit reports that we had been instructed to bring with us and transfer numbers from each section of the report to the one-page handout.
She conveyed the information on the PowerPoint slides as to how to locate and transfer various numbers from LOBO Trax audit to the handout for a total of 11 numbers. The first task was to locate the outstanding hours for the core requirements and fill in Box 1.
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Finally, after filling in all 12 boxes with numbers from the audit report, the adviser apologized for the math involved in adding up the last 4 numbers to determine how many hours we need in order to graduate.
Right before she dismissed us, she said, “If you have any questions, make an appointment with your adviser.”
Why can’t the PowerPoint presentation be available over the Internet with a PDF file with the boxes available for download? If A&S thinks it necessary, a video of the adviser going through this short exercise could augment the PowerPoint and PDF file. Argh! It would have saved me $58 and would have saved the environment an unnecessary injection of CO2 emissions.
Rubie Gayle Kinsey
UNM student
