Hello all,
As I earlier predicted I would be, I am hear to snivel a bit.

I have been accepted to PhD program in NZ with full scholarship, stipend, funding, and intra-departmental support - this is great, and I am, or have, been very excited and grateful.

The process however is taking forever, so long in fact that I fear sometimes I will not arrive in time to collect my papers.

I am an American citizen living in Germany, and over the course of the fall, while the US government was in shutdown, acquiring my background check papers was delayed. As soon as I received them I sent off my completed visa packet to Hamburg, where it was then transferred to London.

The packet is complete and all filled out properly but I received a rather vague request via email from my assigned CO for "more information," the email stating that a letter would soon follow and that I must respond by 17 January. Well, the letter never came (my guess after looking over the email is that is was probably addressed in the Anglophone style, which won't work in the part of German I'm in) and now the deadline is this week. I wrote via email to the CO several times asking for an elaboration upon the questions, and also for data about where to send my response - no answer. No returned phone call. I'm not even sure whether to send my follow up information to Hamburg or London.

I am very discouraged by the thought of what I have come to think of in dealing with certain bureaucracies as "low communication" derailing what has been an effort years in the making. I know a lot of the posters on this forum have come through Phd programs so you are aware of the work involved *just* in acquiring departmental sponsorship and acceptance to a program.

It is tricky trying to figure out how to deal with the nonresponsive CO. This is just an impression but I got the idea from the email that it is not a person who places great value in written communication, and the person is not reachable by phone, either. And I really strive not to be *that* American, pestering, hectoring, and acting entitled. I've actually been happy with Germany's diminished emotionalism and emphasis on task completion. And as a sometime teacher I am extremely reluctant to attempt to go over this person's head and try to contact a supervisor. That scenario never ends with good feelings or outcomes. Yet time is running out.

I guess I will sleep on it and reach out again (to someone somewhere?) in the a.m.

More esoterically, I wonder if the time of multiculturalism has passed us (as Angela Merkel did NOT say). I know has become insanely difficult to immigrate to both America and Germany, and apparently New Zealand also. I predict in the next decade international graduate scholar exchanges will dwindle.


Anyway, thank you for listening.
- PL