Virginia Tech, may I see my schedule for tomorrow, please?

Classes at Tech start tomorrow, so an hour ago I thought it would be wise to check my schedule to see where tomorrow’s classes are.  Virginia Tech has a pretty good set of online tools that allow students to accomplish a variety of tasks related to their relationship with Tech.  my.vt.edu, is the hub of most of the tools.  From there a student can check his tech email, register for classes, view his schedule, and more.

The task at hand was to check my schedule.  For example, I know I have a class at 9:30 tomorrow, but was that English or multivar?  What building and room is it in?  The answer to these questions haven’t been important until now.  Wanting answers, I made my way to my.vt.edu and signed in.  I clicked on the “Courses” tab to be greeted with this message: “There appear to be holds on your account.”  The use of the passive voice didn’t help make the statement less accusatory.

This was the first time I had seen the message, but I put off it’s investigation for a later time.  My task was to check tomorrow’s schedule.  I clicked the “Student Schedule” link to see this page:

“OK,” I thought, “Whatever the reason for the hold, they should never deny me from viewing my schedule!”

Onto the investigation.  Looking at my billing history (which I won’t show here) it seems that just last Thursday the Engineering Exploration department finally got around to signing me up for a class that they require Computer Science and Computer Engineering students to take, ENGE1104 Exploration of a Digital Future.  This meant an additional charge was added to my account five days ago without notification.  (This apparently also means that Tech considers an unpaid bill that was given out five days ago outstanding.)  The way I see it, I can’t find out where to go to class tomorrow because Tech’s system blocked my access to my schedule, but worse they blocked it because I was added to a class late that I don’t want to take anyway.

At a speech during the engineering freshman orientation last summer, Bev Watford Ph.D. told the audience or rising freshmen engineering students and their parents (paraphrased), “At tech we like to be on the uncomfortable edge of technology.”  Needless to say, I’m feeling a little bit too uncomfortable.  Frankly I think the Engineering Exploration department should be ashamed of its disorganization.  Many students who were required to take the class didn’t get a spot until last week, so this means there must be many others in my situation as well.  I’m going to see what I can do to get that bill paid, though frankly I think it’s ridiculous that a hold was put on my account for so recent a bill as well that the hold blocked me from viewing my schedule.  I just hope those other students had the foresight to save an offline copy of their schedules even though it should be unnecessary to do so.

Rants
Billing, Engineering Exploration, Virginia Tech
19 January 2009 comment [1] TrackBack-URI

1. My Piece of the Inter(.)net » Obligatory update to my Tech schedule problem posted on January 20, 2009:

   [...] night I posted an entry, venting my frustrations about a problem that arose when I lost access to my class schedule.  [...]

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment