Today marked the end of my first official week as a graduate student at Northwestern University. For those who don’t know, I am enrolled in the university’s School of Education and Social Policy, working towards getting my Master of Science degree in secondary education with a focus on teaching social sciences.

Classes started last Tuesday, which means I’ve had a full week of class so far.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how Northwestern University is. I used to be a undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so a lot of my classes had hundreds of students crammed inside a lecture hall, during which we would all robotically take the exact same notes on our notebooks or laptops, then leave the hall in unison. Northwestern’s classes are a lot smaller, and it has more of a personal feel to it.

I’m taking two classes this quarter, one history course and one education course. My history course seems a lot like a regular lecture, but with a lot more interactive and inquisitorial aspects. My education course is laid out as a complete discussion, where everyone is encouraged (and somewhat required) to participate in the class, which is laid out more as a conversation than as a lecture.

The environment at Northwestern has a different feel as well. It seems like students here are here to actually study, while students in Madison seem to be there to have fun and enjoy their time. It’s also a lot less busy, and the number of people exponentially decreases as the day gets darker (as opposed to Madison, where more people tend to come out during the night).

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Northwestern students appear to have a lot more pride, as noticed by their choice of attire. In Madison, there are a lot of people wearing UW-Madison-related clothing, but percentage-wise, Northwestern’s is significantly higher. I’m not sure if this is because it’s early on in the quarter or not, but the difference is so drastic that it was one of the first things I noticed.

One unfortunate thing about my situation is that I’m a commuter student. I chose to commute rather than to live on campus to save money, and because I’m taking classes only three days out of seven. The drive to Northwestern is over an hour, but when comparing housing costs versus gas and hour/investment costs, commuting is still significantly cheaper. I also have a parking spot that’s relatively far away from the main campus – about a mile and a half – but there is a free shuttle service that drops me off in the heart of the campus.

Being a commuter student does mean that I’ll be participating in a lot fewer Northwestern-related events because I’m not always there on campus, but the environment overall seems to be a lot more friendly and communication-inducing because there are a lot fewer people around.

For those of you curiously keeping up with the unfolding of the epic tale of my laptop repair, I have another update.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I received a phone call from Dell. As a side note, they were supposed to call me the morning following my complaint at 10 AM, which they definitely did not do, but the call still came eventually.

Dell ordered some parts to their repair facility – parts that they originally thought would fix the problem. When those parts arrived last week, the technician apparently installed those parts, and my laptop was still not fully fixed. According to the new customer service representative who called me today (who claimed to be some sort of supervisor or manager), after replacing those parts, my laptop still would not turn on.

So, they had to diagnose the problem again, and came up with some more parts that they would be able to replace. This time, it is supposedly some cables that might be defective. Dell claims that those cables were also out of stock, have been ordered, and should be arriving at the repair facility before the end of this week. However, the arrival time was an estimate, and could possibly take longer.

I was told that I would be receiving a phone call around October 2 with another update.

So now we wait.

(Again.)

I have another update about my broken laptop.

Before last Tuesday, my laptop’s repair was on hold because Dell was waiting for a replacement part to come in stock. The part arrived last Tuesday, so my laptop was released from hold and the repair process began again.

Since then, I had no updates from Dell, neither through phone nor through the website’s status check interface.

I called Dell earlier today to ask them what was going on. The woman who answered the phone claimed that my laptop was still on hold. I let her know that my laptop was released from hold last Tuesday and the repair had already begin, so I was calling to find out why it’s taken six days to fix my laptop so far with­out any success.

She said that the laptop was forwarded to the escalation crew, and she would speak with her supervisor to find out the reason for the long repair time.

When she said “speak with my supervisor,” I think she meant to say “ask my supervisor for help with coming up with an excuse so this customer stops complaining.”

She came back.

“The repair is taking a very long time because it is an in-depth and complex repair, and we need to take extra precautions to ensure that the data on your hard drive is safe.”

Well, that’s great.

But I already know that my data is safe.

Because I took out my hard drive before sending my laptop in to Dell.

My hard drive is literally sitting right next to me, on my desk.

After sharing this information with her, and accusing her of blatantly lying to me, she began profusely apologizing (which I didn’t care for, seeing has her apologies have no significance to me), and claimed that they need 24 hours to find out what’s really going on with my laptop. She says somebody will call me back tomorrow at around 10 AM.

Probably not the best idea to lie to me about computers, seeing as I was a former computer technician myself, am still qualified enough to be one, and could probably fix my own laptop in half an hour if I had access to all the replacement parts.

So now we wait.