Am I Asking Too Much?

If I didn’t know better, I would swear that the administration is purposely out to screw me. The exam schedule is printed quite far in advance for in-class exams. Take home exams are usually scheduled a little later in the semester, and they usually have a window of time in which you can choose to complete them. I took lots of classes this semester with no in-class exam—instead, we have one or more papers to write. Therefore, it was no big deal to me when I was asked to start my summer job immediately following the exam period. I figured that I would have a good block of time during the exam period in which Finbar and I could take a planned trip to Florida.

Then Prof. Marbury decided to move his last paper to the exam period. And the EU Law class had no fixed exam date. We asked and asked and asked and got no answer. So Finbar and I cancelled the Florida trip. But I thought that I might sneak up to the City of Light to see him for a couple of days between the last day of classes and the first scheduled exam (a take home that I planned to take at the beginning of the first full exam week), because his birthday is the same day as our last day of classes..

Well, they finally got around to scheduling the exam and it’s the very first possible exam period. So... no time to see Finbar for his birthday. Now I have exams on the 27th, the 2nd, and the 10th, plus a nice long paper to write in-between. I start my new job on the 16th and will need to move down on either the 14th or 15th. Please tell me exactly when I am supposed to be able to fit a birthday trip into that?

I’m looking into the possibility of taking the take home exam on the 4th instead of the 2nd, which would possibly let me visit over a long-ish weekend (Fri- Mon, for example). It would help if Prof. Marbury would give us the exact guidelines for the final paper so that I would know that he isn’t going to insist on having the paper finished at the first half of the exam period. (All of the professors who give take home exams seem to think that this gives them the right to demand that we turn in our exams early so that they can grade them early and go home – or, technically, go research-- for the summer.)

The thing that really gets my goat about the whole thing is that we’re still waiting for these kinds of answers just two weeks from exams. How on earth are you supposed to plan your study schedule and decide when to take your take home exams if they can’t get a schedule settled at a reasonable time in advance? And I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up for a vacation before starting my job if I had know that the schedule would look like this.