Making Movies and Jumping Through Institutional Hoops

A friend of mine recently had his 50th birthday. A couple of months before the birthday, I recruited several of his friends to help me make a movie about his life.

I have a "Timeline of American History" book in my library at home and used that to select major events to depict in the movie. Google.com proved an invaluable resource for finding pictures and even audio clips of speeches by Kennedy, Dr. King, Malcolm X, etc.

One Sunday afternoon, myself and two of my friends' long time friends tooled around town shooting commentary on the importance of various locations. It was good fun and gave me additional insight into my friends' lives.

I spent too many hours putting the whole thing together and then enlisted the help of yet another friend who burned the whole 2.8GB project to DVD.

At the party, I handed the DVD to the birthday boy. He had no idea what was on it and with a house full of people he wasn't about to check it out right then and there. After a half an hour or so, I couldn't stand it any longer, I had to find out if his DVD player would play the movie. The DVD player on my laptop played the video just fine, but the audio was terrible while my home DVD player (a problematic first generation DVD player) wouldn't even recognize it as a DVD.

So I grabbed the disc and ran downstairs to my friend's home theater. He just bought a new DVD theater system from Sony so I was pretty confident he'd be good to go. Sure enough, it started right up without a hitch. I left it playing.

Within a half an hour of that, some folks discovered it running and folks started migrating to the basement to check it out. It got a few laughs and it was fun for me to watch others enjoy my labor. I could have done so much more if there had been more time.

Making movies is fun and it's remarkably easy in this day and age. I'm strongly considering dumping a bunch of cash on some new hardware and software so I can pursue this hobby further.

As for jumping through institutional hoops... I've recently returned to school taking advantage of my work's offer to pay for one class a semester and for the offer of three hours a week to be used for attending class. So I've been in a class for the last couple of months and it's going well.

I have an undergraduate degree already, but am chasing another. I rec'd an email this week saying that if I didn't pick a major, I was not going to be allowed to enroll. Trouble is, I want to get a degree in engineering (electrical, computer science, mechanical, civil?), but I can't be admitted to the School of Engineering until I've demonstrated sufficient proficiency in math, meaning I need more math credits.

So what am I to do? Pick an arbitrary major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and then change it later? That's exactly what they expected me to do. This is such a complete waste of everyone's time that they ought to do away with the requirement, so what if someone wants to attend school indefinitely without declaring a major, so long as the school continues to receive tuition payments in a timely manner, why should they care?

As it is, I had to visit two different offices, taking 10 minutes out of two people's day, fill out a carbon form in triplicate, hand it off to someone else for a signature (more time) so they could then return it to the previous office (more time) so someone else could process it (more time).

What's with this? Understand that I have been around this institution for so long that I've come to accept these ridiculous procedures and simply go along with them, but I can vent here and perhaps someone will read this and realize that things don't need to be so convoluted.