Bbbubuut I wanted to take molecular biology, not microbiology!! *wahh!!*

[dbblsanta]

Okay, I know I'm always hard on the freshmen students when I make my posts, but I'm seriously beginning to doubt the value of a program where you take students fresh out of high school, move them halfway across the world to NYU's tiny satellite "campus" (read: an old house) where there are only about 250 or so total students. It being a study abroad program, the classes are pretty easy, the teachers not too difficult, and we have enough staff such that their problems can all be solved pretty much instantly and in person, and they can go back to eating their baguettes and French pastry.

I must say, coming from NYU in New York with hundreds of buildings and departments scattered all over the city and tens of thousands of students, NYU in Paris is pretty awesome. But I know fully well that this is not at all the way the real NYU actually operates.

It is now registration time for the Fall 2010 classes. For the first time, the freshmen will have to actually deal with the NYU-New York bureaucracy. Cue absolute mayhem as everyone in the school flocks to the tiny library to use our computers and feeble wifi, which, due to heavy use, has been flickering on and off for the past few days.

One freshman student today was actually crying over registering for classes, actually going up to a random graduate students in the library wanting help from them. And then after she couldn't give her any answers she tries the same spiel on another graduate student. They may be older; they may be wiser; but not only do they probably not give a damn, they are not academic advisors.

"I was registered for molecular biology which only had one prereq which was biology, but then I got kicked out of the class because they said I didn't have a chem prereq which is really for microbiology. I called the department and they told me it was the same class but it's not the same class and I just want my classes why is this so hard wahhhhhhhh!!"

[Aethian]

It wasn't the same class when I was taking both of them at the same time. Now I don't know but they sure as heck covered different things at different levels.

[dbblsanta]

I don't doubt that, the suckiness was her complete overreaction. Calm down, take a chill pill, call the department with the course numbers in hand and explain what happened! Don't cry and whine to random graduate students!

[Kogarashi]

Agreed. Crying gets you nowhere with the academic departments, especially at such a large university.

And my husband would gladly back her up with the difference between the two courses (he's a molecular biology PhD student).

[Shalom]

"I was registered for molecular biology which only had one prereq which was biology, but then I got kicked out of the class because they said I didn't have a chem prereq which is really for microbiology. I called the department and they told me it was the same class but it's not the same class and I just want my classes why is this so hard wahhhhhhhh!!"

I have seen, and experienced, exactly this.

When at Brooklyn College (CUNY) I wanted to take Human Physiology. This course could be registered in two ways, through the Biology (or Nursing? don't remember) department, or the Phys.Ed. department. It was the same actual class, it even had the same course number (22.71, if I remember right). The only difference was that if you registered through Bio (or Nursing, whichever) there were a series of prereqs that you had to have, but if you registered for PhysEd 22.71, there were none.

Guess which way I did it.

(As it turns out, the School of Pharmacy wouldn't accept that as transfer credit except as a general science; I had to take HumPhysio over again. It may have had something to do with Brooklyn's physio course being one semester of 3 credit hours whereas SUNY/Buffalo's physio course was 2 semesters of 4 credit hours each. Quite a difference in the level of detail there.)

Regarding getting kicked out for not having the prereq, Brooklyn didn't do it that way; as I found out when signing up for Photography 1 (which had 2 Drawing & Design and 1 Art History prerequisites which needless to say as a Chem major I didn't have), they'd sometimes let you register for the course and take it, but if they found out at senior check that you missed the prereq, they'd deny you the credit. Also, you could get permission sometimes to take them out of order. E.G. I needed to take Quantitative Analysis before Microbiology, but QA was given in the spring and Micro in the fall, so if you had to do them in the recommended order you could be stuck for an extra year. I therefore had them waive the prereq for Micro so I could do them in the reverse order. Of course I then didn't wind up taking QA in the spring at all, but I didn't need it by then, once I'd switched to a Pharmacy Practice major at SUNY.