An Exercise in Patience

Germans are good at complaining. Especially about bureaucracy and anything to do with administrative tasks. And I’m no exception of that rule. Coming to France and being confronted with their way of doing things is proving to be an exercise in patience.

The thing about French University administration is that it’s not one department, or one person that’s difficult to handle, it’s all of them.

The first problem was finding my departmental coordinator to talk about my courses. Her office hours were Wednesday from 12 to 2 p.m. Unfortunately, the people at the International Office who were supposed to give us this information only passed it on to me on Thursday. During the week we had to wait to be able to see her, I discovered that the French test I had to take to be able to enroll in French language courses did not work for anyone in my program. By the time Wednesday rolled around and I managed to see our coordinator, I (and everyone else in my program) was already slightly exasperated because the Language Center of the University did not answer any of our e-mails asking them if they could fix the problem. Our coordinator, after glancing at my Learning Agreements told me she would take care of the problem. However, it would take another week until they found a way for us to do the test.

That didn’t mean that they got back to us quickly after we had informed them of our results. 8 days after taking that test, we got an e-mail from the responsible person, informing us about the Grammar courses we could take, and that the practical courses were, sadly, already full. The reason for his delayed reply? He was behind on reading his e-mails. When you’re eight days behind with reading your e-mails, your definitely doing something wrong. It took another phone call by the English department’s coordinator to get most of us into those practical classes.

            While enrolling for courses at the English department was not as exasperating as getting into a French Language class, it still proved to be a small adventure. After making as wait at the door of the enrollment office for a while, we were ushered in and handed yellow files to fill in. Then we handed these files to the secretary who tried enrolling us in the courses on her computer. Tried. As it turned out, the courses had not been entered into the system yet, even though the registration for Master students had started some days earlier.

            A week later, we would find out that the courses in the course handbook that we had been given were actually not the courses that were offered (even though we were handed the handbook for 2013-14). The courses I ended up taking were actually quite awesome, but if you think you’re sitting in a course on The Great Gatsby, and then get handed a syllabus titled “The American Civil war in Poetry, Film and Narrative”, it’s a little baffling to say the least.

            As I said, Germans like to complain about bureaucracy, but by now, I have come to appreciate the German system. At the moment, I’m trying to imitate the French students, and take it all with half a smile and a shrug and come back the next day, or the next week. There’s days where I manage. And then there’s days where I don’t.