Grad School- Returning from a Leave of Absence

After finally distributing my thesis to my committee, I got to deal with the paperwork of returning ti university from a leave of absence. As a doctoral candidate, you are expected to be continuously enrolled from the time you pass your last exam (making you a doctoral candidate) until you defend your thesis. By continuously enrolled, they mean that they expect you to pay tuition. Well, I had serious issues with this because the reason my leave went on so long was because I clearly wasn’t a priority for Prof Sunshine. So I appealed the requirement for continuous enrollment. The dean hears such appeals. The dean thought that I should never have been permitted to take a leave of absence so close to completion of my degree. However, when presented with all my evidence (emails showing when I had submitted each chapter to Prof Sunshine, postmarks on the envelopes which I received feedback in, time stamp provided by the department secretary when I picked up feedback on the last chapter), he decided that Prof Sunshine hadn’t acted in my best interests and made Prof Sunshine pay 50% of the tuition accrued in my absence. Actually, my program secretary took care of me there. She back-registered me for off-campus dissertation work- which is about ¼ of the cost and doesn’t have any computer, lab and facility fees added in because you’re off-campus. I didn’t even know such a course existed!

Now, once I was back-registered, I expected the bursar to issue me a bill. So did my program secretary. A week went by- no bill. So I called the bursar. They don’t issue paper bills anymore- you need to log in to your student account and pay it. My student account had been deactivated 2 years prior. So I asked to be transferred to the person who deals with students returning from leave of absence. That person was completely unable to help me. She informed me that if I couldn’t log in, then I would have to come to the bursar’s office in person. Did I mention that I was living over 400 miles away from the university? So I called my program secretary to verify that the bill had to be paid prior to my defense date (generally, all bills have to be paid in full before you can defend). When she heard what was going on, she gave me 2 numbers. One for the IT department to try and get my student account reactivated and one for a bursar that she dealt with. IT informed me that they couldn’t reactivate my account until I had paid the bill AND my advisor had requested that my account be reactivated. So I tried the bursar number and got the bursar that I had worked with on the student health committee. Said bursar decided that I was getting the run around. She logged in, told me how much I owed and asked me to FedEx the check to her. Two days later, she had straightened everything out for me regarding registration and the bursar. However, she still couldn’t activate my student account, which is an issue its very post.