An open letter to the University of Alberta

Good morning everyone. I've got a bit of an odd situation, so let me start off with some background info.

I'm an international grad student enrolled in the MACT program. Since that program is offered primarily online, I'm still living at "home" in Gallatin Tennessee. I picked this program because it seemed more reputable than competing programs I found in the US, both those available within commuting distance and those offered online. The online nature of the program seemed to soften most of the hurdles traditionally associated with seeking a degree across international borders.

For the first year of the program, all those assumptions proved true and I was very happy with my overall experience with both the MACT program and the University of Alberta as a whole.

Then you stopped accepting credit cards.

Now the entire landscape has changed. Had my first few semesters gone like this, I would not have stuck with the program. By the time things took a turn for the worse, I was heavily invested in the program and hated to turn back. I can't say for certain that this move is costing you business, but I can state with authority that it has greatly tarnished my personal experience with and perception of the U of A brand.

As of right now, I still have a balance of $20.66 CAD. But on the day I made my international wire transfer payment, I printed the exchange rates published on the U of A website along with the info sheet for international wire transfers. I took this to my bank and paid a $45 USD fee for the wire transfer. Apparently in the 4 days or so it took the transfer to clear, the exchange rate was not kind to me, so my payment fell short by about 2.8%.

But how am I supposed to deal with this? I took the most up to date info available to me at the time, provided by you. I have no more control over the markets than you do. Last semester, the same thing happened, only I ended up over paying by about $25 CAD. That semester, I sent money orders via international post. That cost about $18 USD, required me to fill out customs forms, would not allow me to get any sort of delivery confirmation, and took several weeks for delivery. I had assumed it was the length of time that resulted in the imbalance, so this term I tried the faster yet more expensive method of international wire transfer. Although I must admit the relative speed is also much easier on my mind. Having no way to track or confirm delivery of something as important as payment for my education provided a very stressful couple of weeks last semester. That stress stems from a process over which you have no control, but the fact of the matter is I experienced that stress as a direct result of a change to your systems. So that experience tarnishes your brand perception anyway. I can avoid that stress in the future by disassociating myself with your brand.

With credit card payments, Visa or Mastercard took care of all the exchange rate madness instantly, so such discrepancies did not happen. Now, international wire transfer is the fastest method available to me, and that takes close to a full business week. It will be virtually impossible for me to make a payment that is correct to the penny. If I'm short, I can either spend $18 (USD) to send you $20 (CAD), and wait for several weeks. Or I can spend $45 (USD) to send you $20 (CAD) and wait about a week. Either way we can easily end up in a Zeno's Arrow situation where I'm faced with spending $18 or $45 (USD) to send you $0.60 (CAD) a month later. If I'm over, I'm sure your institution is placed in a similar situation. Only I lack the means or authority to state and enforce exchange rates past the initial transaction. And to tell the truth, I probably wouldn't worry about it even if I could. How much hassle justifies that last 3% lost to the market?

So to avoid all this, I've asked a classmate, an Edmonton native, to settle up my account as a personal favor to me. Given my options, being indebted to a classmate is the least ugly and gets around the volatility of the market.

Chances are, I'm an edge case. I doubt you have many, if any, other international students who are not actually living in Canada. Such students would have access to Canadian bank accounts and thus would be able to pay with "electronic checks" using native Canadian currency. But I would not be surprised to learn that the parents of international students have found themselves in situations similar to my own. If you've noticed a dip in the recruitment or retention rate of international students, the added red tape introduced by removing the option to pay with a credit card would be the first place to look.

This process costs me about an extra 3% per semester anyway. There's no quantitative measure for the added stress, and I have no means to track the time lost compared to the simplicity of the "old" credit card based payment system. If your institution offered an option to pay with a credit card given a ~3% markup to cover the added costs to you, I'd accept that offer in a heartbeat. And your brand perception could shrug off the layers of stress and aggravation I've come to associate with it over the past year.

Thank you for your time.
Derek Pennycuff

ARGH!

Ok, I make an honest effort to keep this blog as positive as possible since it's my professional / educational blog. I have other haunts I frequent in order to discuss things like sex, politics, and religion. Here, I try to stick to the sort of thing that I don't mind someone reading before they call me in for a job interview (or chose to not call me). But sometimes things happen that are related to the topics I try to cover here that I feel justified in sharing here. Today, such a thing happened. I got to see some of my previous work butchered.

This has actually happened before, on the same project. Of course, I should know once the product is delivered to the client all bets are off. I should know better than to even go look. It can't possibly end positively. But like rubberneckers at a train wreck, I just keep going back to look again.

Let me give you a little background. When I went back to TTU for my degree in web design (oh crap, that page has been ruined since I left too), I had a job at The Technology Institute. I don't think they do it anymore, but back then they'd actually take on programming projects either for the TTU campus or for our sister schools or for the Tennessee Board of Regents. TBR governs both the 4 year state schools like TTU and the community colleges, like Vol State, where I currently work. They also just launched a redesign, and it's decent. A vast improvement over their old site. I don't care for nested drop down menus though...usability and accessibility nightmare.

When I first started the job, we had one major project that had been in process for nearly a year. It was for TBR. The idea was sound. They wanted a site where prospective students could research what degrees are available at TBR schools and what jobs are associated with those degrees. So if you know which school you want to go to, you can browse their degrees and plan for your future career based on that. Or, if you have a career in mind but don't know which schools you should apply to, you can navigate the system based on jobs and work in the other direction. Or, if you just know what you want to major in, you can find schools and / or future careers. It's a pretty simple relational database issue and it makes intuitive sense to the target audience.

When I came on to the project:

• The database was built but sparesly populated
• Accounts were funtional, but most were inactive.
• Account management and data entry forms were built and functioning.
• The front end interface was built.
• The lead PHP developer had just dropped out of school to take a job in Nashville.

We had a pretty good LAMP project going. It was built by students, and it showed. But we fixed our mistakes. We got to learn about the importance of normalizing a database the hard way. That probably took the most time. :)

The role I took was largely adding performance enhancements. I replaced the tables with a pure CSS layout. I wrote my first unobtrusive javascript, replacing literally several hundred lines of Dreamweaver generated scripts with about a dozen lines of code. I assisted with some MySQL and PHP clean up. I added a couple of functions that required creating new admin forms. I performed final testing (unfortunately, not with “real” users) and delivered the product to the client. By the end I was pretty comfortable with the project aside from the icon based navigation.

There are 16 job categories, each with a few sub categories. I think there was something like 83 in total. Rather than expressing these as text, each category and subcategory had an icon associated with it. I knew that introduced a high probability of misinterpretation of the navigation, adding to the learning curve. How do you communicate an idea like “Construction Plumbing” in an 80 x 80 pixel icon? But I also knew how much work went into those icons and didn't want to deny the graphic artist her moment in the sun.

About a year after we delivered, I surfed over to take a look. I had just taken my current job and was reviewing the examples of my work cited on my resume. The front end was completely different. All my CSS and javascript work was gone. The graphic designer's icons were gone. But functionally it was all still there. So I could at least tell myself I still contributed to a site whose purpose I believe in. Even if it was all back end stuff that no employer could look at in any meaningful way, some of my work was still there.

Today I'm looking for broken links in our “helpful links” page maintained by our career placement office. One of the links goes to The Tennessee Career Information Delivery System. The project I worked on lives on a different sub-domain of that same server farm, so I replaced “tcids” with “pathways” to check it out again.

Apparently the table that stores the 16 job categories and the table that stores the sub-categories still exists. The rest is gone. The Admin link doesn't even go anywhere. Once you get to the level of sub-categories, a whopping 1 click into the system, rather than being able to drill down any further and get info on degrees and / or the schools offering those degrees in your browser, you are prompted to download a .xls file. The meat of the database has been replaced with flat Microsoft Excel files. This pains me greatly.

The only surviving evidence of my involvement in this application is the HTML comment found on line #23, in reference to the IE whitespace bug.

<!-- The following just holds the entire "banner." It's all on one line because IE is stupid. -->

I pretty obviously wrote that. I'm not sure if the placement on line #23 was intentional.