School

Today I found out I miss-calculated how many courses I needed to do to complete my degree and that I need to take three more than what I thought. It has been a bit of a blow to my plans for the year and things are going to be much busier than I wanted. I wanted to end my degree with less stress, not more, especially because I am going to apply for the Clinical Psychology program and that requires a B+ average over my last four psychology courses. You know I'm gonna be fa-reaking out about that, so why the hell would I want to be stressing over not failing a bunch of courses I don't even like??

To backtrack a bit, the reason I found out about my miss-calculation was because, for my loan and allowance qualification, I need to be studying full time. That means 4-5 courses per semester. But I was only going to be taking 3 courses in my first semester and two in my second, meaning I was considered part-time. In order for me to still receive my loan and allowance, I needed to get my faculty to sign off on a Limited Full-Time application (there are a bunch of reasons you can qualify as Limited Full-Time, mine was that I was finishing a recognised programme that was less than full-time). So, I filled out my form and took it into my faculty today and the girl I spoke with checked out my programme and course history on the computer. And then informed me that I was 45 credits (three courses) short of what I need to finish my degree. I was all, "What the hell?", thinking I had worked everything out correctly. But no.

I came home with a sometime-in-the-near-future-but-no-date-yet appointment for a degree planning session at my faculty so I can ensure the extra three courses will fulfill my programme requirements. In the meantime, I have enrolled in two extra courses which will hopefully be fine (I very carefully read and re-read the requirements) and am waiting on the third to be enrollable (that is a word, honest) because there is a glitch with the online enrollment system for that course. I also had to totally change one of my courses, a general education, because of scheduling issues. Basically, it appears that every course wants to have a class on a bloody Monday or in the evening or on Tuesdays when I have my Youthline stuff. One almost needs a degree in degree planing/scheduling/enrollment in order to get any of this done without screwing up.

Now that I am almost enrolled in 8 courses for this year, I no longer need the Limited Full-Time application, but I am going to need a box of stress balls, a mindfulness reminder, a very precise schedule and extreme determination in the face of difficulty (something I find very hard). For the next 3 weeks I am going to be psyching myself up for the workload. My main goals are to do very well in my 3 psychology courses and pass everything else, even if only by a hair. I've also told myself that I can drop one course per semester (before the deadline) if I judge the workload to be too insane, and then do two courses in summer school. However, I do want to try to see if I can do it. I guess I'm just concerned about doing my very best in psychology without failing everything else. I want so badly to get into Clinical. To the point where I don't have a solid Plan B in case I don't get in, because, for me, there is no other option. I am NOT getting a friggin' degree in psychotherapy from AUT, thank you very much. I'm not overly fond of that theory of psychology and I think that in order to be a really effective, versatile therapist you need to know how to apply a broader range of theory. And I don't particularly want to work in research, either. I want to be working with people to help them with whatever their problems may be, thank you very much. That is what I want.

Plan B is probably Josh getting a degree in law and my becoming a staying at home mother. :p

Fingers crossed everything works with the enrollment and I can get this degree done and dusted.