Re: Settling...

Aww, I hope your writing is on an upswing, lB! Can't wait to see you!

I'm about to settle too:

I submitted a grant to my grant analyst to send off for university approval. It's been quite a headache dealing with bureaucracy! The grant analyst is new, so I knew this was going to be a long process, but my expectations were too high. Sure, since she's new, she didn't know which documents I exactly needed. That's understandable. But she should be computer literate! I had to teach her how to create shortcuts and find things in the menu of Microsoft Word. She failed to find my field of study in a scroll down menu (which was in alphabetical order). She couldn't spell 'psychology' or right click to find the correct spelling of it. When she finally collected all of my documents to compile into a single pdf, which she emailed to me for review, I opened it up to see but a single page - the cover letter. Ugh! This is my last chance applying for this particular grant too - perfection is essential. Also, I'm not here to train others in computer use either - I did that when I was twelve. Perhaps Berkeley should have just hired middle school students!

In short, I'm now just settling for my complete application to end up at the National Institutes of Health.

On top of my grant ordeal, I learned that I cannot mail things myself. All mail items must go through the campus' mail service, which sounds like complete bureaucractic bullshit. It's already ridiculous that we can't change lightbulbs by ourselves and that we have to purchase furniture through a company affilitiated with the university. No wonder the university has financial problems - they should steamline more processes and fire incompetent employees. There is a department specializing in this too! (Industrial engineering and operations research)

I don't want to read another email about the university's financial hardships, given these experiences. This is all crap. I suspect America's health care also needs some streamlining and ideological changes too, but that's another rant. Will not delve into politics.


lB, sorry to rant at you... I don't have anyone else who'll listen so patiently. =/