I might come off sounding like an idiot in this post, but oh well, here goes. I just checked the graduation requirements for my degree. As for coursework, it looks like I’m good there. I just need to straighten out one tiny detail (at least I think it’s tiny) and everything should be fine. Well, I also need to pass two more courses next term, but I’m assuming that’s going to happen. There’s also the matter of not having received my grades my last term yet. Yeesh, this is perhaps a little more tenuous than I thought.
Anyways, the biggest problem I have discovered is that I kinda forgot to form a little thing called an “supervisory committee”. This committee is supposed to be headed my academic supervisor (which I have) and one other faculty member. After one semester of coursework, I was supposed to give a presentation to them about the courses I had taken and will take. This presentation would outline the reasons why I thought I should be taking these courses and how this would fit into my graduate education. The committee is then free to make suggestions on course choices and we come to an agreement on what to take.
So, yeah, I kinda forgot to do this. And I’m about to enter my last semester of coursework. Don’t ask me how this happened. I have a little bit of worry, but I am not in a panic. Why? Well, because as I mentioned before, I still have one more semester to correct anything that needs fixing. Is it a lot of room to maneuver? No, but at least I caught this before the point of no return. My supervisor is also a really, really nice person who would like nothing more than to see me graduate and get the hell out of here. Also, I think it’s my choice who the second faculty memeber is on my committee and obviously I’d pick someone who is sympathetic to my cause. I already have the person in mind and I just hope he agrees to it.
Is there still a possibility for disaster? Sure, this is bureaucracy we’re talking about and even under the best circumstances when you follow regulations down to the letter, things can still go wrong. Clearly, in my case I’m forming my committee extremely late and I might run into a whole bunch of roadblocks. The one possible sliver of hope I have is that these types of rules, I believe, can be easily be bent if the people in charge like you enough. That’s a big if, because I’m not sure if I even matter a damn to my department beyond my supervisor. If you ask me though, the MECH department owes me after the whole TA fiasco.
The bottom line is, there is nothing I see that will absolutely prevent me from graduating in May. To get there though, I’m gonna need to fix a few things between now and then.