Well, I'm at my parent's apartment. I always wind up staying here when I have to be somewhere in Phoenix or the West Valley early, and I always wind up regretting it because I find it nearly impossible to sleep here at night. Of course, the fact that I slept for about four hours this afternoon probably didn't help either...

Anyway. I talked to the department counselor and submitted my Declaration of Graduation. I also found out that, as usual, ASU has fucked up royally. My DARS (degree audit) report claims that I am not, in fact, a political science (B.S.) major. This despite the fact that the change-of-major paperwork I have from two years ago clearly says that I am. Also, my C++ Programming class from community college did not go through as a CS credit, and the only way to appeal involves having the professor of the course petition the university about it (which is not going to happen), so now I have to take "Introduction to the Internet" or somesuch ridiculous course to fulfill that requirement.

Speaking of administrative idiocy, let me tell you about our university president, the illustrious Michael Crow. He's ex-CIA; though I assume he was a bureaucrat and not an intelligence operative. My European Politics professor says he's "the kind of guy who could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo." I'm not sure how apt that analogy is, but at any rate, you get the general idea. First, he's recommended a tuition hike of $500 to the Arizona Board of Regents - this after we were promised that the $900-or-so tuition hike from last year would be the last for a while. Second, he's proposed some cockamamie scheme to create a "Department of Global Studies". The vagueness of that phrase gives you the feeling that he has absolutely no real idea of what this would constitute, and you'd almost be right. What he *does* know is that he wants to take professors and classes out of other departments for this, and pretty much fuck up the whole distribution of funds. It doesn't seem to occur to him how many fields he's talking about; in order to be truly "global", we'd have to be take from history, political science, economics, anthropology, humanities, language and literature, geography, sociology, religious studies, psychology... not to mention the College of Fine Arts, and maybe even the College of Architechture. If he wants this so bad, why not just make it an interdisciplinary degree program? It's not as if we don't have those already. But that would, I suppose, be too simple.

But back to me. It seems that after this semester, I'll only need 24 more credit hours, and only about 12 of those are required classes, so I can easily graduate in Fall 2004. If I finally send in my History CLEP, that'll give me another 3 credit hours, and getting my minor in history would then be easy. I was thinking, though, that if I took another semester, I might be able to get a concurrent degree in history. I'll have to talk to the student advisor before I try anything like that, though.

And now, I'm going to attempt to go to sleep for three hours, so I'll be somewhat rested for my first day of on-the-job training.