Dear Prospective 2013 Graduate;
Congratulations on your approaching milestone! As your partner in learning, the University in its infinite wisdom has concluded that your years of lost sleep, missed family and friend events, class attendance, form completion, research, humiliation, isolation, paper writing and Sisyphean task completion - which you probably thought would allow you to simply graduate with a modicum of dignity, in accordance with the course catalog as you viewed it when you started - are a crock of fresh-laid bullshit, and has elected to shrink your goal daily, making it appear as though graduation as a possibility slips away even as you approach.
Picture the University Board members lurking above in shadow, taking turns with a bottle of gin and a Pocket Fisherman, dangling a modestly improved future over you and chuckling as you choke to death on papers. We like that image.
No, simply finishing the work of becoming educated won't be enough; there's going to be some jerking you off going on, and if you don't roll over for us relentlessly fucking with your shit, well, you can always not graduate. How's that for pants-shitting terror and regret, tough guy? Feel that wave of ice that starts at your guts and permeates your whole life as you swim for the whirlpool that will inevitably kill you as the boat of your future sinks? That's the thought of not graduating after all of this crap you've ingested, so tie on your bib and get ready for the next course.
Before you can graduate, you will need to visit the Office of Hand-Holding, where you will be assigned a Babysitter. This person - who knows fuck all about you - will replace your adviser, who has likely taken an active and personal role in helping you achieve your goals up to this point. Well, fuck your adviser, they're out - here's the Babysitter. You will need to schedule appointments to sit in the same office as the Babysitter periodically. They will have you fill out forms until you actually die and then climb, re-born, from your own ink-stained corpse, and then tell you things you already know and give you bad advice before vomiting out forms that must be signed by three other people. The good news is that the the three other people know what bullshit this process is, and will gladly cooperate. No-one likes the Babysitters.
After the Babysitter, you still can't graduate. You thought you could? How stupid ARE you? Nope, then there's going to be testing. I mean, Baby Jesus and Allah Junior in the sandbox help you if you attempt to deprive the University of money by testing out of anything - we'll turn that shit into the equivalent of the Men In Black job interview combined with an IRS audit & and an invasive exam before we're done. No, this is just a circus of other regular pablum tests you thought you'd seen the back of with high school; a skills aptitude, to prove you can think, and a departmental assessment, to get us funding. One of these has an arcane scheduling hopscotch attached to it, the other you just show up for randomly, sometimes in the night when the birds crow. We will email you about both simultaneously, and with nearly identical subject lines. They might even be in the same email. You won't give two-fifths of a fuck at a rolling donut about either, but we're legally bound to cajole you to care, because, you know, of retention and funding issues you care less than lunch about.
After that, you can graduate, right? Ha and also, ha. There's still exit interviewing, robes and hats and rules and rings and shit, endless fairs and "advice," and maybe, just maybe and only if you get around to it, passing the fucking semester you're in. Also, before you even skin out, we're going to start in on you about giving us more money when you're gone; because you want to actually pay green money to us until you bleed from your soft parts, and we feel that. Before we're done with you, you will feel like a homeless person in a hamster ball, just roaming from one campus building to another, making appointments for and spending money on things you don't want.
Good luck, (possible) graduates! You're going to need it.