Azn Studies

BOSTON - With the graduation clock looming, I've been struggling this week to complete four years of delayed paperwork in one week. This has included applying for honors, getting lunch tickets for commencement, removing classes that my transcript shows I have been enrolled in for two years and declaring a minor. Usually minors are declared along with majors in the spring of the sophomore year. I barely made the major deadline, and sure as hell wasn't pushing to apply for a minor, which is exactly the kind of thing you can let slide.

Besides, I figured I could just complete the necessary classes for minor and then receive it naturally. Kind of like those people who are awarded honorary degrees after they're dead, or maybe not. But I kept plugging away on Communications & Media Studies (our fake journalism program) at the steady clip of one per semester.

This fall, when it was actually time to declare a minor, I was in for a rude surprise. I didn't have the right classes for the communications minor. I needed two more, even though I'd taken several, because the ones I had taken were all from the same "cluster" of the minor. I balked, and decided that I really didn't need a minor in communications. After all, people say a minor is useless anyway.

So the next thing I did was start searching for another minor. Because while minors might be useless, it did seem just a little unnatural not to get one. It took a little bit of digging, considering there was only one semester to go, and I already had three classes to take to fulfill actual graduation requirements, but I found one: Asian Studies. I've taken a lot of Asian classes, both in language and just on the culture, so the requirements were already filled. I e-mailed an art history professor in charge of the program, which is interdisciplinary (a fancy way for saying that we can't afford to hire faculty).

Here is a paraphrase of what happened over eight or nine e-mails:

Me: "I want to minor in Asian Studies."
Her: "Great!"
Me: "Do I meet the requirements?"
Her: "Sure!"
Me: " What about the independent project?"
Her: "Just use your seminar paper from your Chinese politics class."
Me: "Great!"

It was set. This week, after completing that Chinese politics seminar, I printed out the paper, and went to have her sign it. The Art History building is right next to < Sophia Gordon Hall, which unfortunately won't be completed for another three months. That meant dodging cranes, bulldozers and six or seven people in hardhats to arrive at the department's office, housed in a 19th century brown house.

The secretary was not in. Neither was the secretary's student worker. The only person there was a pleasant professor, who must teach on Dadaism or the French Revival. I asked her where the Asian Studies adviser was, and she replied: "Well, she's in Japan. Until July."

Yikes.

A great plan ruined, all because of 10,000 miles and Japanese art. What followed was a little too painful to describe, but suffice to say it involved an impromptu thesis defense, hyper-printing, and more faxing on my part that any time since 1994. But I made it: when I graduate on Sunday, my diploma will say that I minored in Asian Studies.

Actually, diplomas don't list minors. Damn. Minors really are useless.