Dear Midyears,Welcome!

It was only about a year ago that I and my fellow midyears finished up the same series of lectures (commonly referred to as "orientation") that you all just finished, where we were assured that we would be taken care of and that the transition into school would be smooth with special help and special consideration along the way for our special group of students.

For the most part, you will find that those assurances will be upheld throughout your years here.

The midyear program was created with a lot of intensive thought and careful consideration.

Those charged with starting the program knew that nobody would choose to be a midyear if it were difficult to graduate with the rest of their class in the spring, so they enacted polices to make doing so more feasible.

We are the only group on campus that, as first-years, can transfer credits to Brandeis from universities where we studied before we got here.

The University goes out of its way to advise midyear students on the premed track to take classes at Brandeis the summer before they arrive.

For the most part, there is sufficient support and consideration for our kind. Or at least there was.

Friends, you are entering a school in dire financial straits, driven to dangerously foolish cost-cutting extremes.

The need to shrink our budget gap has, to a great extent, clouded our administration's thinking.

Case in point: The Rose Art Museum debacle. If you haven't heard about that, ask anyone who was on campus last year. I'm sure they'll be more than glad to explain the whole thing to you.

On a perhaps bigger and scarier scale, the intensified pressures stemming from an increased admission rate and frozen/shrinking faculty and stagnant options for housing are ushering in an era of radical administrative thinking that is affecting the University and its students in a grand variety of fashions.

Now, some good has come out of this process.

The Justice Brandeis Semester program offers exciting opportunities for students to get field experience while receiving University credits for their endeavors.

It may be arguable, though, whether such a program is actually in line with the University's philosophy of a true liberal arts education.

But nonetheless, it helps the University to stand out among our equally ranked counterparts.

One department that has been forced to significantly change its policies in response to the school's shifting needs is the Office of Study Abroad.

Last year, students receiving merit scholarships towards their tuition here were told that the money probably wouldn't carry over to study abroad. Then they were told it would.

This erratic flip-flopping best illustrates the perhaps questionable thought processes of an extremely pressured study abroad office.

The current situation seems to be that all sophomores planning on going abroad during their junior years must apply through the Office of Study Abroad by Feb. 12, so if need be, Study Abroad can make the process selective.

Because of the study abroad application requirements, this means that all students must declare a major before their junior year and also choose a school that matches their academic interests.

In the past, students interested in going abroad in the spring of their junior year had until October of that same year to apply.

Yes, this change is quite annoying for all students interested in studying in the spring, but it is particularly disadvantageous to us midyears.

It means that, after only two semesters, we must choose our majors with near certainty and find schools that offer courses into which we can work on those majors.

In an e-mail to the Justice, when asked what consideration, if any, was given to midyear students when making these changes, Director of Study Abroad J. Scott Van Der Meid responded only by saying, "All students have eight semesters at Brandeis and all students are eligible to study abroad in semesters 5, 6, and 7 of their time at Brandeis."

So, in other words, no serious consideration was given to the plight of the midyear student.

Yes, what Van Der Meid says is true, but if we want to stay on the seven-semester graduation track, we can either forget going abroad, have an unbelievably crammed last semester here or decide what we want to major in after taking only eight department classes.

This most certainly does not jive with the exploratory spirit of our liberal arts institution.

Regardless of their result, these changes prove to us that sometimes nobody here has our back.

The administration and University departments are hard-pressed to decrease spending, and it now appears that the weirdness of our scholastic schedule isn't even an afterthought for them.

We need to have a loud voice and ensure together that we are not forgotten during these radical financial times.