Have you ever had to do something important — something very very important — that kept being held back by something unimportant? Perhaps you’re cooking something wonderful to eat, every flavor is perfect, you’re just about to bite into this wonderful meal you’ve made for yourself and someone with a clipboard and an eight-hundred page manual knocks it to the floor because you had it on the wrong color of plate. Has something like this happened to you (not the food thing, obviously, but something along those lines)? This has been happening to me recently and it’s not very pleasant. While everyone I have recently been dealing with has been kind, helpful (as far as it goes), and understanding, it is difficult for my sympathy to remain in place for such extended periods of time save one thing: they control whether or not I am able to do what I need to do. They hold the cards.
My specific situation concerns my dissertation (that would be the “very very important” document) and it is disheartening when working on something you are so personally interested and involved with be held up by things not only of questionable importance but not even of tangential relationship to the nature of your work. At any rate, I bring this up because I find it an important element to address that happens in educational settings and beyond. The movie /Office Space/ has what is to my generation a classic example of this: the cover sheet for a certain report. Without commenting on the nessecity of such red tape (as it is sometimes necessary and sometimes not) I think that students should be aware that there is no magic moment when the red tape disappears. In the same breath, if there is unnecessary red tape that you are ever in a position to question and challenge please do so for the rest of us.