Category Archives: Academia

Stop Trying to Take My Money!

It’s only forty minutes away from the start of literary abandon, the start of late nights and lots of coffee, the start of a new story beginning to unfold, the start of the timer slowly ticking away until the end of the month, and the start of a shooting word count. Only forty minutes away from the start of NaNoWriMo.

I may be one for a bit of dramatics, but really, I’m stoked for this upcoming month of November. I think I have a great plot that I’ve managed to somewhat outline and even managed to convince one of my friends to at least attempt this with me! Which is pretty big, because I’ve never done NaNo with literally anyone I knew. (Yes, I’m shooting daggers at some of you for not participating! :P)

I’m not sure how I’m going to fit NaNo in with college and extracurricular activities, but I’m just going to make time. It will be great in the end to see another novel that I’ve pushed out. :D

In other, much less exciting news, a few days ago I received an e-mail saying that my student account is negative $3,900 and a hold will placed upon it. My heart literally stopped. I was freaking out because at the beginning of the year we paid off the remainder of my bill that scholarships and loans didn’t cover so I wouldn’t have to worry about that during the year.

I should’ve know better.

So I’m looking over my statements, calculator in hand, trying to figure out what in the heck went wrong. Turns out UMKC dropped one of my scholarships and two of my loans. So I headed over to the Administrative building to find out why. The loans turned out to be a technical mistake. Something that I filled out didn’t go through so I just had to complete it again – kind of annoying but it was an easy fix. My scholarship, however, I wasn’t supposed to receive in the first place.

At the beginning of the semester, they gave me two specific scholarships (among others), but apparently you can only receive one or the other. So they realized their error during the semester and took it off, with no warning or e-mail or anything. Which would have been nice. “Oh yeah, sorry to tell you but that $2,500 scholarship we said we’d give you, we’re not giving you anymore!”

To say the least, I’m pretty upset about it. I’m just pissed that they weren’t even slightly sorry about it. It’s not a big deal about paying it, my parents will pay it and then I’ll pay them back, but I’ve just had so many administrative problems with UMKC in the first 4 months of school that I’m ready to go crazy.

And now I need to apply for some competetive scholarships because I’m not receiving as much financial aid as I thought. :( Money sucks!

The last month, except for that, has been rather unexciting. As the semester goes on I keep adding to my list of why I hate my French professor. I started planning out my classes for next semester, too, so that’s kind of exciting and kind of not, because half of my courses will be science courses, which I’m not a fan of. But I’ll just push through.

I hope you all had a wonderful day of stuffing your face with candy! I didn’t do anything for Halloween just because of the amount of homework I had and perhaps because NaNoWriMo is tomorrow. :P It’s never too late to join if you want to (which you totally do!)!

I am a Cookie Monster

My Tuesdays and Thursdays are always a bit of a relief in the week because I’m able to sleep in. I don’t have class until 2:00 PM and it’s absolutely great. While I wanted to remain in my cocoon of warmth, I forced myself out of bed yesterday around eight so I could go talk to an advisor from the business college. (To clear up some confusion: I attend a university, and this university is made of up different colleges. Like Business college, College of Arts & Sciences, etc.)

As much as I really, really want to be enjoying my French class right now, I’m not. I absolutely hate it. My professor is rude and assigns a ridiculous amount of homework and, I just hate the class. I don’t know if I just want to give it another shot next semester to see if it was just my professor or now. I don’t know, I just need to think on it some more. I dread working on the homework and consider skipping the class (even though part of our grade is attendance) every day. Argggh! Je ne sais pas!

Anywho, I went and talked to one of the business advisor’s and asked some general questions about requirements and then officially changed my major. All of the classes I’m taking now transfer except one, which is nice. She suggested some courses for next semester and I’m pretty excited for it. I don’t have an emphasis yet, but it feels good just to be able to say right now I’m going into Business Administration. :)

At the beginning of the semester I had a lot of stress from the confusion of my credits that I received in high school from other colleges. In the dual-credit program (I received both high school and college credit) I took three math classes and an English composition class. It was absolutely great and I sent the transcripts from the college over, except UMKC forgot to put them on my transcript. >.< So I’m enrolled in an English class I already have credit for and there was all this confusion and the advisors didn’t know what to do, blah blah blah.

Well that’s all figured out now, which is a relief. I’m still in the English class, and my transfer credit will just count as an English elective instead. So I’m getting something out of it at least. Though let me tell you, my English class is bonkers. The majority of our grade is based on one research paper, and the paper has to be about writing or research. Therefore, we have to write and research for a paper about writing and research.

Yeah.

I finally decided that I’m doing my paper on the intertextuality of Harry Potter. Which is exciting because I love Harry Potter, but also very boring because,well, it’s about intertextuality which is not exciting at all. I’m not really sure how I’m going to incorporate the research into it, because I feel it will just be more of a rhetorical analysis, but I’m probably just going to bullcrap the entire paper anyways. Oh, college. :P

Tomorrow is me and Andrew’s two-and-a-half year anniversary. :love: We found out there is a Renaissance Fair out here that’s almost exactly like the one back home in St. Louis and we’re going tomorrow as our kind of date. Haha, it’s going to be fun!

Well, I think that’s all for now. I’m going to head up to the cafeteria for some dinner and hope that they have cookies. :P Me and Alysha have been sneaking out probably six or seven cookies each time we go to stash up in the dorm room. I wish I could send you all a cookie so you could try it, because they are absolutely delicious. To die for. Whenever people ask me what my favorite part of college so far is I always tell them the cookies. ;) We’re running low at the moment – only two left! – so I need to go change that right now.

Gosh, I’ve turned into a cookie monster!