Category Archive

OK. Wow, this entry might be a doozy but I’m going to have to try and condense events as much as possible because I’m unsure that I’m ever going to have time for in-depth entries ever again! My schedule is frightening me that much.

I left off with me taking a taxi to St Pancras to get the train to Nottingham. Luckily for me the hotel called a driver who was a friend of theirs instead of an official taxi driver, so I was allowed to set my own price for the ride. The internet had informed me the usual price for this run was around £26, but I got away with paying £20. This is still a ridiculous price, but there you have it. I was one of the first people on my train so I managed to have a place to store my copious belongings. Late-boarders were not as lucky since there’s barely any storage space on Midland Mainline trains. This later proved to be a huge problem when it was Rebecca and I boarding in the middle of the train’s run from Nottingham to Leicester with 4 huge bags.

I met Rebecca at the Nottingham train station and we took (another) cab to her friend Lonnie’s apartment. Lonnie, who was someone I only knew about previously as Rebecca’s “heavy metal Pony friend,” was absolutely lovely and a really great hostess. While in Nottingham I got to see pretty much all the tourist attractions they’ve got, including Nottingham Castle (with its snazzy new exhibit about the Robin Hood BBC series. Unsurprisingly a terrible exhibit to accompany a terrible show! Although at least the terrible show is more entertaining than the terrible exhibit) and “the oldest pub in Britain,” Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn. Later that night I got to meet some of Rebecca’s friends, including Hugh Laurie Part II.

The next day we futzed around until it was time to catch our train to Leicester. Another friend of Rebecca’s picked us up at the station and gave us a place to crash for the night. In the morning we walked all of the luggage several blocks to my dorm. It really wasn’t terribly far, but it seemed pretty far with all that junk in tow!

I’ll post more on aesthetic impressions another time, when I’ve got some accompanying pictures. All-in-all Nixon Court (my dorm) is better than I anticipated. Of course there are very few people on my course who live nearby, so that’s a bummer, but the rooms are nice enough. I don’t have a very social hall (another bummer) but I’m going to do something very revolutionary and attempt not to talk too much about people on this (very unlocked) blog because that always comes back to haunt me.

For the W&M readers amongst you I’ll give you a sense of where I’m living. I’m about as far away from the main campus as I was living at Ludwell, but sadly there’s no bus for the rainy days. My department is located a bit away from the main campus in an old building that probably used to be a private home or, dare I say, apartment? Oh College Apartments… So, basically, this is a very familiar living and campus situation!

I went to International Student Orientation, which was basically a waste of a week. The sessions were boring and only tangentially relevant, simply reiterating the (admittedly scattered) information off the website. I did meet some people from my course though, so that was nice. (And even though I only have good things to say about them I’m still cutting off here, as I endeavor not to talk about them!)

This week we had yet another registration, which consisted of getting our handbook and Study Guide. It contains the information about who is teaching each module, unit, session or tutorial. The timetable for when each of these sessions meet is found on Blackboard (oh, how I didn’t miss Blackboard!) and it’s a truly complex and confusing thing. Each session is marked with initials and group names indicating who has to attend it, so I went through and marked all my sessions. I’m a #, which indicates Museum Studies (as opposed to Art Museum & Gallery Studies), as well as in groups B, 2, Warrington, Lundy and Jupiter. So now we know who’s teaching each session and when they meet, but what do we have to do for each one? To figure that out you need to go into each professor’s folder on Blackboard and find the document that corresponds with the topic they’re teaching on each day. Your readings and assignments are in there! However, each professor does it a bit differently so it’s not really uniform.

So a lot of cross-referencing and information to synthesize even before you get to the information you’re learning! I’m very anal about to-do lists and schedules so I’m not sure how this is going to work out just yet. I think I’m going to try making myself a spreadsheet with meeting times and readings etc all in it. But there’s already reading to be done! Oy vey.

This wasn’t meant to be a complaint-filled entry by any means! I’m enjoying myself and the course looks fascinating. My professors seem brilliant and entertaining and I can’t wait to get started. I just wish I could mentally organize instead of having to do it all visually

My tuition payments worked out. All I had to do was call and authorize the charge before I made it. Apparently generally authorizing charges from abroad is not enough; specific charges have to be verified separately. That’s not going to get annoying at all.

There’s also an update in the financial aid situation. Leicester never received any of the documents I sent to them, including the Student Aid Report that it takes the government over 15 days to mail. I’m not exactly going to be home in 15 days to forward that on to Leicester. Luckily the lady I spoke with was extremely helpful and–provided Uncle Sam doesn’t mess up–the SAR should be shipping directly to her.

This brings me to my rant. I did plan for this blog to be narrative, but I’m going to take a moment to rail against the U.S. Postal Service.

It sucks.

That’s the short version. The long version is that this is certainly not the first mail of mine that the Postal Service has lost, though it is the first containing sensitive financial information. If you don’t pay extra to insure and track your package I’m convinced they just throw it on the trash heap because they know you can’t go after them. Even without tracking and insurance I paid $28 to send my financial aid documents to Leicester, and somehow they never got there. I partially attribute this to the fact that my post office is staffed by the single most incompetent man on the planet. I wanted to overnight everything, but I was told that Global Priority Shipping was not actually global. I would have to send everything via another method (can’t recall the name) and it would take 5 days. It still cost $28. And, let me repeat, it never got there. This was before I discovered FedEx, which I never would have explored had mail arrived at my house on time. I’m almost positive the delay in my mail occurs once it reaches the US, since everything has been sent to me via Air Mail.

In short, write by W.A.S.T.E. Or e-mail. Or spring for the $40 package that you know will arrive, as opposed to the $28 for nothing.

Also I’m sick, which will be a joy as I go through customs and try to explain that my hacking cough isn’t actually TB.

Apparently sending packages around in really a counter-productive manner is just a side-effect of the holiday weekend.

Now it would be nice if I could hear back from someone at Leicester with those reassurances that I will actually be able to register… and that I requested days ago.

It would seem that FedEx has marked my package as having arrived. Where has it arrived? Newark, NJ. This was, incidentally, its point of origin. It left out of Newark, was routed through Memphis, TN, and has now “arrived” at its destination. Of Newark.

FedEx is closed tomorrow, so they won’t realize their mistake until Tuesday. Which means my package will not arrive at its real destination until 4 days late. And I paid $43.04 for the privilege.

Seriously folks, one outrage after another.

Today I received a packet of information from the University of Leicester, including a 38-pg brochure for international students that I had already received over 2 months ago from all the universities that I am not planning on attending. I had found this brochure online a week ago and was a little perturbed that Leicester didn’t seem to be in the habit of actually mailing things to people, or alerting them to the availability of information. (I had also discovered a bunch of information on applying for your visa. This was not linked through either the Graduate Office or the International Office, my two main points of contact, but via the Student Support and Development Service. I found it by chance after an hour of perusing the vast unconnected wasteland of the University of Leicester’s website. Their offices are so discrete as to not even refer to one another even when their information overlaps. They are desperately in need of a reorganization, and this is not even current bitterness speaking.)

While looking at the website I also discovered the fact that you have to register for classes twice. First you have to pay your tuition, then on 17 September you have to register online. On 1 October you have to register in person.

Nowhere, nowhere on the website was Pre-Registration mentioned. That, however, was the second part of the mailing I got today. It is due to the University by 3 September. I don’t have a blessed idea as to why this mailing reached me at such an absurdly late date. So far I have had to confirm my acceptance of Leicester’s offer of place 3 times. This Pre-Registration amounts to nothing more than a 4th confirmation and an enclosed photo for my ID. I have always returned these superfluous confirmations the day or the day after I received them, so they should have been processed long ago. Yet it somehow appears that I am so low on the mailing-list priority that they figure, heck, America’s not that far. Let’s send it to her really obscenely late and see if she can still get it back to us in two days.

T0 be fair, it might not be the University’s fault. It might be Royal Mail. It might be the US Postal Service. It might be Customs. It might be a combination of all potential culprits. I don’t know yet, because I haven’t had a reply to my email (which is a shorter and more accusatory version of the exceedingly polite letter I enclosed with my forms) and Royal Mail appears to be anti-postmark so I have no idea when my package was sent.

I went to FedEx to overnight it, but apparently US companies take US holidays off even when they’re in other countries. So Monday 3 September? The date Leicester expects to receive my registration by? Labor Day. Even $43.04 will not expedite my package to arrive any earlier than the 4th.

If this impedes my ability to register for classes this year I will scream so loudly that you’ll be able to hear it.