Graduation is Official

It’s official. I’ve graduated.  The graduation ceremonies took place in late May, but I held my breath until the degrees were conferred.  Earlier this week, all formalities and paperwork were completed, and my electronic transcript was updated:

The New School has an amazingly inefficient bureaucracy.  Princeton Review has ranked the undergraduate school, Eugene Lang College, as 2nd in the nation for Long Lines and Red Tape.  Just booking rooms for meetings of the University Student Senate was laborious, at best.  One snarky facebook group suggests that,”This school runs like an asthmatic duck with no legs.”  The administration is working to remedy this, though until they do, I’ve learned to assume that paperwork will get lost and that instructions on administrative processes are largely inaccurate. At a party this past weekend, another recent graduate joked about the nightmares she had about new and creative ways the school could fumble formalities, preventing her from receiving her degree.  I was having similar nightmares.  Now, I can sleep soundly.

As a dual-degree student on a five-year track to earn a Bachelors of Art and a Bachelors of Fine Arts, I felt the full brunt of the bureaucratic inefficiencies. The separate administrative bodies for Eugene Lang and Parsons often disagree on what the requirements for the dual-degree program are, and no one seems empowered to reconcile them.  Indeed, of the ten or so people I know personally who started out at the New School in this program, only two others completed it.  Most students are fully aware that the course-load to complete the degrees in the five-year time frame is significant.  They tend to drop out of one degree track upon confronting inconsistent requirements and administrators powerless to help students balance the demands of two schools at once.  I thank my academic advisers, Paul Ross and Brian Maasjo, for making the extra effort to help me through.  The dual-degree program is an amazing educational opportunity to pursue the fine arts and liberal arts with equal rigor.  I’m glad I found the allies to make it work.  This has been awesome, inefficiencies aside.  Given the New School’s comittment to promote interdisciplinary education, I sincerely hope that it will find ways to make the dual-degree program more accessible and efficient.