University of Illinois
I’ve been accepted into the UofI MSDS program!!
And… alas… I cannot do it.
This Masters in Data Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was without a shadow of a doubt the best thing I could have done to take advantage of the TAA support.
However, due to some oddities of time constraints of the TAA program, I had some hard deadlines. In order to get a TAA program approved you have to be accepted into a program and registered for classes. You have to do this before getting approval from the government.
The staff at UofI were helpful to a point. They were relatively quick to direct me to the proper application process. However, when I explained to them that I needed to be accepted, enrolled and registered in approximately two weeks they sort of dropped the issue suggesting this would be unfair to other applicants.
I can sort of understand this. However, there is one aspect of this leads to believe it need not have been this way… This particular masters program is entirely online. Why in the world would it have mattered to slip in one more remote student?
I contacted my career adviser at IDES to discuss options. I had to fall back to IIT because I couldn’t get UofI to move quickly enough. The staff at IIT know how to move quickly to help people in my situation. It did not seem likely that we would be able to drop that and seek another approval. Furthermore, once you are in a TAA approved program, you may not pay for course on your own. I asked if we could get a waiver for this. No luck.
So I had to inform UofI that the best I could do at this point is seek a deferral. I might be able to purse this starting approximately a year from now.