Yesterday I sent so many emails and had so many phone calls with Studylink.

As far as I can tell, there have been application declines that don’t actually match up to applications submitted, and extra verification requests sent out to Massey. Where it’s at right NOW is that Gloria from Studylink, who was actually extremely helpful and nice even if she didn’t really have any good answers for me, has sent a verification of study details request to Massey, which she says they likely won’t receive until Monday. My emails to Massey have discovered that when Massey gets these, it takes them about two days to process and respond. The one that came in yesterday saying I wasn’t full time must then have been from before I switched my papers from a diploma to a bachelors.

So, in theory, on Monday Massey will receive that, and they’ll send the response Tuesday or Wednesday, and sometime mid to late next week Studylink will approve my allowance, which Gloria says is definitely for sure sitting on pre-approved right now.

And then even though I left ten minutes early for my exam the bus kept getting stuck in roadworks and I was nearly late and very very stressed for the first part of the exam and couldn’t take anything because the anti-panic meds also zonk me out, but I managed to settle myself down and got through the exam. I think I passed it. I don’t think I got an A, but I’d be happy with something around a B or B- and would accept a C+. To my advantage, the exam is only worth 40% so the marks I already have from assignments will be a big help, because I’m getting maybe a B+ in that 60% that’s already been graded.

And now I’m starting to look at what I need to start off the summer semester. I’ve ordered five textbooks from Bennetts – each paper has one compulsory one, while Endangered Cultures has five recommended ones, one of which I already own and one Bennett’s didn’t seem to have. And now I’m looking up some stuff on self-motivated learning in the hopes I can get myself more organised from now on. I did find that AnkiDroid, one of the Android-based flashcard apps, was really helpful studying Te Reo, though I think it would be less so for policy where it’s more having to know in depth concepts and ideas that don’t really fit a flashcard format so much. I’m also thinking about getting a whiteboard over my desk to have a highly visible timetable of what I should be doing, somewhere to jot important notes, and maybe a gold start chart or something.

Stream/Moodle opens up for the new papers on Monday, a week before the semester starts, so I can also log on then and see what resources they have available. They don’t automatically send out the binders full of course materials for these, so I’m hopeful that they’ll have electronic files that I can put in Evernote or store directly on my tablet or something, which is something I came to realise would have been very useful for social policy where I had so many readings to do.

More fun tales of trying to get an education while disabled!

Backing up a month or so, I had decided to increase my workload to three papers a semester next year, and two over summer – for summer school, three papers is full time, and during the year it’s four. I was due to see the doctor in two or three weeks anyway for another lot of medication so I started my application for loan and allowance, indicating that I’d be applying for limited full-time status.

So last week I get my papers in to Massey for limited full-time. The basic process is that I fill out the forms and then get them to Massey, where a staff member completes them and then sends them to Studylink. Instead, I got an email from Massey saying that actually, even though I’m part-time every semester, because I’m doing summer school as well I’m technically a full-time student by Studylink guidelines as they don’t traditionally assume people are doing summer school. However because my papers were split across two programs (the diploma I was doing originally and the bachelors I was upgrading it to), that didn’t count, because they had to be under the same program. I had two choices – apply for limited full-time anyway, or change all my papers over to the Bachelors and just apply as a full time student.

I chose the latter, and spent half an hour or so wrangling with the Massey system to re-assign the papers from the Diploma, a process which involves withdrawing from the ones that hadn’t started yet, submitting the changes, then re-enrolling in everything again. Then I re-did my application for a student allowance, as a full time student. I had forgotten to put in the amount I’m currently earning, so I got a phone call yesterday afternoon to check on that conflicting information. We sorted it out, and she told me that the application was “pre-approved”, meaning everything was fine and they just needed to confirm my study details with Massey.

This morning I got up, made some breakfast, and sat down to check my email. Lo and behold, I had a new message from Studylink. I almost didn’t go to read it, assuming it was just notification that my allowance had gone through, but luckily I changed my mind and logged into their web interface.

The subject line said “Application declined”. And a system error won’t let me open it. Given what I was told yesterday, I can only assume that Studylink was told I was not a full time student, and I’ve emailed Massey to see what’s going on.

The summer semester starts Monday week and I’m not sure if I get an allowance next week since it’ll be between courses. In the meantime I have a list of books to buy, especially for Endangered Cultures which IIRC has a pile of them, and apparently I’m some kind of Schrodinger’s Full Time Student. Fantastic.

In the same way that sometimes I like to pick up a few apples at the supermarket so I don’t look quite so unhealthy when I go through the check out (even when I use self-check outs, because I’m neurotic like that), I’ve been looking at Android apps in the education section. And then I’ve been going “wow, these are about 85% for educating three year olds” and googling “academic android apps” instead.

One of the interesting things about studying extramurally, is that the course has this great opportunity to take advantage of technology. It’s centered around Stream/Moodle, there are forums right there, you could do all sorts of things with that that even account for students who don’t have a wide range of hardware tools – but of course, since the teachers tend to be fairly stretched, it’s hard for them to take advantage of this. They still have to teach, and unless you’re studying a computer topic, chances are they aren’t familiar with everything themselves and taking the time to learn means cutting back on something else.

Which is disappointing, really. I filled out the online survey for the Social Policy paper I’m just finishing and the major comment I had was that one easy thing to do would be to provide pdf files of the readings in a clearly marked place. Because sending us out these huge folders, that’s great and the readings are really helpful and all, but having an electronic format isn’t just about having a different way of reading it. There’s the portability, the much lower cost of baggage if you’re a full-time student traveling to contact courses lugging the materials for four different classes, and of course the ability to take advantage of computer or tablet based study aids, like evernote or zotero or gdocs. With the right file reader you can still bookmark places in the text and highlight interesting passages, just like on paper – but you can also find particular passages a lot easier, drag articles into an app so you have the things you need for citing right there, etc. And this requires very little effort at the university end – presumably these readings do, at some point in the process, come from an electronic file. So all they need to do is make that file available.

At any rate, this is all stuff I’m figuring out on my own right now, whereas I know a lot of people who are further ahead in their studies or have finished graduate degrees or use this sort of thing in their jobs. So advice time: preferably with a focus on a) Android apps or b) web-based or Mac-compatible services and programs, what are some invaluable tools? And more specifically, is there some kind of app that does really good text reading help, like combining a dropbox utility like Evernote WITH a file reader so you can, I don’t know, drag parts of the text into a different area to save them so you can jump right to them, or make notes about the text as though you’re doing the software equivalent of writing in the margins, or something like that? But mostly I just want some recommendations. I’ve found a few myself already:

Droidscan for taking photos of pages of text and saving them as pdfs, which would be good for shorter things, though unfortunately many of my readings are 30+ pages.

Astrid looks like a pretty good to-do list app that allows you to do things like setting priorities and deadlines, search through by date or importance or title, and so on.

Wolfram Alpha for asking questions and getting back not just a likely answer but helpful graphs and statistics.

StudyDroid for creating flash cards, including the option of taking photos to use as pictures. Alternatively AnkiDroid.

Plus I also have Kingsoft Office for word processing, the Massey University library app, Evernote, Aldiko (ebook library) and eduport, which is a way to view and save things like TED talks and lectures from various universities.

The above are all Android apps, all available on the Google Play marketplace, though I of course have the Mac version of Evernote as well.