Adrian Herrera / Roundup
As a returning student to Pierce College, I was not looking forward to all this construction I had been hearing about.
I arrived at my first class, or I thought so, on the first day of school to find the music buildings under construction like everything else at Pierce.
It seemed to me that the exterior of the buildings had been recently painted and because of that, most if not all of the classrooms were not numbered.
As I gazed around I noticed that many students were in my same situation, lost in a maze of numberless classrooms. I still, however, began asking if they knew where Room 3414 was and the immediate answer was no.
After spotting two school administrators in the area I walked toward them and overheard one of the administrators saying, “The classrooms are not numbered, this is not going to be good.” I approached them and asked if they knew where Room 3414 was located. One administrator had a map in his hand while the other had what seemed to be temporary classroom numbers to put near the doors. Both men looked puzzled as well.
“Down past the double doors to your left,” said the administrator as he glanced at his map. I walked toward the direction he had pointed me in, but the only classrooms past the double doors to my left were an office and a computer lab.
Just what I expected: The administrator was as confused as I was.
Right after I asked what seemed to be a professor the same question, he pointed me to the double doors, not past it like the administrator had told me previously. I yelled to the other students that I had found the room.
It was already 9:35 a.m. and with no sign of an instructor, two students and I walked to the nearby office and asked the clerk if she knew the instructor who was teaching Music 161. We were sent down the hall to the right, and that is where the office of our instructor, Professor Schneider, was located.
We asked when and where the class was meeting, and shockingly, he said, “The 9:35 a.m. class is cancelled because it was double booked in the same classroom and at the same time as Harmony II.”
Immediately, I was in disarray and could not believe this. Professor Schneider said it was a clerical mistake and there were other sections available at other times and that there was nothing he could do.
I asked him why this had not been noted in the schedule of classes online or why the students had not been informed, and he had no answer. All he kept repeating was that it was a clerical mistake and that he was sorry.
Pierce College failed me on day one. My first day back and I had to deal with this. No numbers on the classrooms on the first day of class, noisy construction everywhere, 40 minutes of searching, and walking around frustrated only find out the class was cancelled with no notice given to the students.
An excellent combination of inconvenient construction and incompetent school bureaucracy.
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herrerajr.adrian@gmail.com