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To think that university graduation teams should cater for separated families?

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DisappointedGraduate · 17/05/2013 13:50

I will be graduating from medical school this summer and have been unable to secure an extra ticket. I therefore must tell either my Dmum, DSdad or Ddad that they cannot attend the ceremony. It's a long story, detailed in the below letter that I sent to the university, but the short of it is:

In this day and age, when many people who are graduating come from separated families, shouldn't universities make allowances to ensure that all of a graduates direct family i.e. parents & spouse can attend?

For anyone interested, below is my full story:

Dear Graduation Team,

I am writing to express my regret and dissappointment with the extremely poor organisation that has taken place regarding the ticket sales for ceremony 12

Due to the 'technical difficulties' I was unable to buy an extra ticket when they were supposed to go on sale last week. As it was so important to my family to get an extra ticket, I have been sat at a computer in the medical school constantly refreshing the graduation ticket sales page since 8.30am this morning.

Bang on 9am the site shut down due to 'high traffic', displaying the message in the screenshot attached to this email. I then constantly refreshed the page and tried restarting Internet Explorer all to no avail. I called the graduation team at 10.05am to be told that the extra tickets had sold out, however broadcast tickets were still available to purchased online. I tried to explain that for me, the site was not working (screenshot) and in this time the broadcast tickets also sold out.

I feel let down by the graduation team on three fronts:

Firstly: I imagine that demand for graduation tickets for medical school graduates is always high, as was the experience of collegues in the past two years of graduates. Therefore it would seem sensible to arrange a venue more suitable to meeting the demand for this particular cohort of students or to split the cohort into two ceremonies. The graduation team member that I spoke to on the phone said that uptake of tickets is variable, which I imagine to be true for other courses, but am highly sceptical that this is the case for medical graduations.

Secondly: I had anticipated a fair first-come first-served basis for buying tickets. This is not the case if the Graduation website is not built to be capable of sustaining the anticipated volume of traffic, so that not all students have a fair chance of accessing the site. This problem became apparent when the tickets first went on sale last week and obviously had not been sufficiently rectified before ticket sales were opened up again this morning, as evidenced by my experience.

Finally: In order to be at my computer at 9am (two weeks in a row), I have had to be late for an important clinical placement. Medical students on their medical assistantship placements (as half of them all will be) are expected to work the hours of a professional junior doctor. Opening up ticket sales when half of medical students should be on the ward seeing patients is at best unfair to the half of the medical student body on their Mast placement and at worse encouraging them to overlook their professional responsibilities. I was able to work late a previous evening (time away from my daugher) in order to be late this morning to buy tickets - not all Mast students would be able to do this.

I am in a situation, like many other students, whereby I come from a split family. I have a mother, a step-father and a father who have all equally been parents to me throughout my life. I also have a husband and daughter, however had already made the tough decision that my parents would have priority for attending the ceremony. I am therefore now in the impossible situation of telling one of my parents that they cannot attend my graduation. This is causing more heartbreak than the amount of joy that attending such an event is supposed to cause.

I am the first person in my family to attend university and during my time in medical school had to have surgery for endometriosis (a condition that threatened my fertility) and, on the advice of specialists, I conceived during medical school and went on to have my daughter. Completing medical school with my medical problems and a young baby has been long and very difficult and I am overjoyed to finally be able to graduate. It is such a shame that an organisational error and poor foresight on behalf of the graduation team has dampened this acheivement. I am not telling you this as a 'sob story' to try to make you magic tickets that do not exist. I am not that naive. Instead I am trying to make you understand that the students you are dealing with are real people with complicated lives and not just entitled individuals wanting their second cousins etc to attend.

In this day and age, I imagine it is very common for students to have more than two parents, not to mention spouses, and believe that it is the graduation teams responsibilty to understand and accomodate this.

The ideal outcome to these issues would be for the graduation team to increase the amount of tickets available by either splitting the cohort into two ceremonies or moving the ceremony to a larger venue, however I imagine that this is unachievable at this late date.

Therefore, I hope that this email provides food for thought and enables to graduation team to make much needed improvements to their services to avoid this level of upset and dissappointment for future years.

Kind Regards,

Disappointed Graduate

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mnistooaddictive · 17/05/2013 13:53

There is limited space, everyone has a reason why their need is the highest. Spend your energy on something worthwhile.