It is looking more and more unlikely that I will be able to take the classes that I need to graduate. They all full, and the ones that open up are, I have gathered, barring admission from those outside of the major field.
For my degree, I am required to take four classes from a list of seventeen. Each of these classes is a 300 or 400 level course, intended for juniors or seniors. (I will be a senior in the fall.) Each of these courses is, intentionally, from a field other than political science, all pertaining to law, ranging from “The Family, Law, and Public Policy” to “Legal Foundations of Planning” They’re drawn from nine different majors, ranging from Human Development to Philosophy. The idea behind this is to ensure that political science students get a good grounding in law, drawing from a variety of different departments.
That’s the theory. The reality is that these departments are so strapped for cash that they can’t teach nearly enough students. So the Human Development department, in order to ensure their students that they will be able to graduate with their Human Development degrees in hand, has closed off their “The Family, Law, and Public Policy” class to non-Human Development majors. That course is one of the seventeen from which I must choose four, so that’s one less course from which I can choose.
But, hey, no big deal — there’s sixteen more. Only fourteen of them are full. And the two that aren’t full…well, those are only open to those majors. Presumably, many of those remaining fourteen are full of their respective majors, too, only that’s not something that I’m likely to have the opportunity to find out.
Virginia Tech consequently has left students with requirements to graduate that cannot be fulfilled. To graduate, I am required to take French 102. But that’s not actually offered in the next three semesters. I have a half dozen requirements that I cannot meet, due to no fault of my own. I would think that the school would recognize this problem and simply drop the requirements, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I suspect that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Again with the one finger salute to Jim Gilmore.