I’m still alive… and p***ed off!

At last… an update! Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. You have to thank my new found e-friend, Diana, for this one. If it weren’t for her, it would probably have taken another looong while.

This past month has been rich in emotion and action. Between my computer breaking, the angst of turning 24 (and realising that I am now old!) and having to reconfigure my future, it has been a busy time that will require many posts to sort this out. First, here is the latest instalment of my Law School saga.

Rejected! (Part II)

From my last post, you know that I have been royally rejected by McGill and was still waiting for UdeM to give me the key to my future on a silver platter. From the title of this section, you probably already guessed what really happened.

On June 30th, date at which UdeM updated their website, I learned that, yet again, was deemed unworthy of studying Law. Needless to say that I was über devastated. At the precise moment I read “nous regrettons…”, I saw my whole future crumble before my eyes: Goodbye long and sleepless nights, goodbye hard exams and goodbye condo on Nun’s Island. Instead, all I pictured was nothingness, as if someone had pushed me off a cliff. It may sound exaggerated, but for a long while, going to study Law in Sept 2005 was the only option I considered and anything else was just impossible. Well, this was a pretty brutal wake-up call that forced me to come up with a Plan B, C, D all the way down to Z.

My colleagues, whom many are lawyers, were equally surprised of my rejection. Being a rooster, it kinda helped the ego a little.

The official reason of my painful rejection: this year’s number of applicants was just overwhelming and, unlike past years, all offers were accepted. Usually, people send applications for more than one school (me being one of them). However, there are some people, instead of making a choice, accept all offers and drop them at the very last minute when classes actually start. This leaves me, and all 55 other people on the waiting list, stranded.

It’s no consolation to be told: “If you applied last year, you would have gotten in”. Well, registration person, maybe I didn’t apply because… I was too busy actually finishing a useful degree!!

The shock soon turned into frustration when I learned that my computer marks were what really brought my evaluation down. I couldn’t believe that this error done while I was still young and foolish would still haunt me today. It doesn’t matter that I did rather well and honourably finished a bachelor degree in Finance, it doesn’t matter that I scored A’s in relevant commerce courses; it all came down to the fact that I can’t program in C++ nor assembly. Who knew that becoming a lawyer would actually involve hard-core programming knowledge? (I can say that in my workplace, it is really not the case!). Now, I really feel cheated.

In my usual ruckus causing style, I was soon enough firing a letter to the dean explaining to her how unjustly I was evaluated and that their faculty would be losing a valuable-member-full-of-potential-that-would-make-them-proud-and-put-them-on-the-map candidate by rejecting me. The letter was pretty harsh (I told them that their marks-only evaluation sucked, but in more diplomatic terms), but it sure made me feel better. Although I made them 25$ richer (yes, there was a fee associated with this procedure…why am I not surprised?), it still doesn’t buy me the guarantee of getting accepted this year.

In the meantime, I got accepted to the Certificate program in Law. That’s their watered-down version of the bachelor program (it’s 30 credits – equivalent to the 1st year of Law school) and a back door to the regular Law program. Since it’s part of Continued Ed, it’s all nite classes with mostly people of the working kind. That’s a plus for me, since I’m still in the studying mode and will be able to continue working. The minus: there will probably be many aspiring Law students that got rejected, like myself, and that also see this as the back door solution. What does this mean? Well, that I have to be at the very top of my class and pretty much ace everything. It’s going to be one hell of a competition, but hey, competition is part of this game.

I have decided to give myself another 2 tries at going to Law school and since they only admit people in the Fall, that means 2 years. Coming to this decision was not easy, it partly meant to postpone my dream. The present outcome of events was something that I did not foresee (rather, that I did not want to foresee) and accepting it is like taking cod-liver oil: hard to swallow. Not only are there implications for my professional life, but also in my personal (I’ll get to this at a later post).

At this point, all I can say is that it’s not over yet. Best case: the Dean realizes that the Registrars made an enormous boo-boo and grants me an acceptance letter via one of those village yellers (“Hear yee! Hear yee! UdeM hereby cordially invites you to humbly accept our VIP invitation to its Law Faculty.”). Worst case: they take my money and I am stuck with nite classes for the next 2 years. Ah… it ain’t over until the fat lady sings or in my case, the short girl yells.