Walking back to the dorm from a Learning Center shift the other day, I was chatting with one of the office staff who lived nearby about our respective majors. He was a double (CS/SE); I was a triple (CS/SE/MA). The difference between us, I discovered, was that he filed a plan of study and I had not.
Actually, the difference was that he
knew that a plan of study had to be filed in order to have more than one major, and I did not. He also knew that this plan had to be filed by the end of your junior year. I was aware of none of this, and subsequently had a slight panic moment.
So that night I settled down and spent a good four hours coming up with every course I needed to take over the next five quarters at Rose. It turns out that the Registrar's office is, as in all things,
really really picky about how exactly this plan be filed. I needed:
- A list of courses, by major requirement satisfied
- A list of courses, by quarter take
- The signatures of three department heads
- The signature of my adviser
- The signature of the dean of faculty
- A letter explaining "special circumstances" (in my case, the desire to graduate in three years)
So once the weary task of gathering all the data from the ill-updated CS and math web sites was done, I set about getting signatures. The CS people were actually pretty good about it; I got my adviser's signature and that of the dept. head almost right away, while the humanities/social sciences department head basically said he didn't care. So all that left was the math department head and the dean of faculty.
At least the math guy got back to me; he said he'd take a couple days to look over the plan. (I've since heard that when he says "a couple of days," he really means "a couple of weeks.") I've heard nothing from the dean yet.
So by the end of the quarter (mid-November) I'll either have three majors, or an aneurysm from trying to jump through bureaucratic hoops. We'll see which it is.
