Dealing with incompetence

Transfer Students
1

A bit of venting:

I thought dealing with my current school (a community college in South Florida) would be a breeze since two-year institutions are built primarily for students who will eventually transfer. My optimism betrayed me. I have made dozens - literal dozens - of phonecalls and visits to several people in advisement, financial aid, the Dean’s office, and my major’s department and they’re all absolutely, bafflingly clueless about these things. They’ve all refused to fill out an adviser’s recommendation, write a brief statement verifying financial need for fee waiver purposes, act as my adviser contact for the respective section in the common app, or betray the slightest hint of helpfulness in general. They keep directing me to other departments, and those departments direct me right back to where I came from.

I’m just really, deeply frustrated. The only friends I know who have transferred out to private or out-of-state institutions did so from the school’s honors program, which has a dedicated advisement and transition services staff serving only them. The things I need are relatively simple but essential to my application, and it’s making me very anxious that deadlines are closing in and things beyond my control are becoming such insurmountable obstacles.

I’m going to keep trying to sort things out once the school reopens tomorrow, but any advice from anybody dealing with similar issues would be much appreciated.

2

I’ve dealt with similar incompetence in regards to my transfer transcript. Albeit, my issue is not as bad as yours.
That being said, I’m guessing you were assigned an academic advisor upon enrolling and they are not helping you?
I’m not sure what kind of security clearance the honors advisement center has, but maybe you could visit them and ask for help? In my opinion, it would be a bit rude to turn you down since their main objective is to advise students. I would explain that all of the departments are not helping you in the least and you really need some guidance.

One thing I had to do was to literally put together exactly what my transcript should look like. Essentially, I had to spell things out to them very clearly and created several sample documents of what they SHOULD be doing.

3

Fortunately, transcripts seem to be the one thing my college has gotten right. Sorry to hear you had difficulty on that front.

Contacting the Honors College is actually not a terrible idea, especially since they specialize in the private school transfer process with their students whereas other students typically transfer to the local state school. I’ll definitely do that tomorrow. Thanks for the tip!

4

Sure. Hope it works out for you. If it doesn’t, we’ll see what to do next.