A Mathematical Pariah Part II

So, in a previous post, I had mentioned that, because I committed the grave offense of taking an extra year to graduate, I was stripped of my stipend and my office. Both of these, while upsetting, made sense to me. However, the thing that did not was that they went through the extra effort of taking my picture down from the graduate students bulletin board. I finally got an explanation why this happened: apparently, according to our esteemed secretaries, I am no longer a mathematics graduate student.

Never mind the fact that I am still living in graduate housing. Never mind the fact that I still can register for research credit as a grad student. Never mind the fact that it was a member of the mathematics faculty who had to sign off on my tuition waver for the year. Never mind the fact that the department still lists me here! Never mind the fact that I still have a department mailbox and receive my bursars bill from the university there. Never mind the fact that nearly every other department on campus has its students take far longer than 5 years (I know of physics students who have taken more than a decade) to finish, and yet they have no problem counting these students as their own.

Nope, according to the supreme dictators of all things mathematical, I am no longer a member of the department. Because I dared take one extra year to graduate. And when I mentioned this, one of our secretaries exclaimed "well you had five years to finish, most people finish by then!" Of course, I am willing to be all that I own (not a lot, granted) that she couldn't even pass a difficult undergraduate math course, let alone make it through the qualifying and candidacy exams.

If that last comment seemed a bit pissy, that is because I am pissed! I still meet with my advisor, work on my thesis, earn my 36 credits a term, and go to combinatorics seminars. Yet a woman who wouldn't know abstract mathematics if it snuck up on her and bit her in the you know where gets to decide that I took too long to graduate, so I must no longer be a mathematics student. Some world we live in.