Once again... my most sincere apologies for my only 3 readers...
After close to two weeks of not posting up anything; here is the explanation of my absence. As some of you might or might not be aware of, I am currently doing my master thesis in some crazy and fancy control strategy. Well the thing is a little more complex than this with the master programme I am "enrolled" in. It is an agreement between different universities throughout Europe (mainly Scandinavia), but I've come to find out that they have the same (or even more) monetary interest as everyone... the worst part, they try to get it at any cost.
I say this because a few months back I started my last semester (4/4) in the programme, according to the rules you can choose where you wish to study your last semester and the thesis project you wish to develop. Since previously you have been in three universities (Halmstad, Lemgo and Esbjerg) you can choose amongst these three. Me and my current colegue in the thesis chose Esbjerg in Denmark and started the 4th and hopefuly the last semester in February.
By the end of April we recieved a letter stating that we had to pay (50,000Dkk = 8,991.65 USD) for current semester... that seemed odd since we were already half way through it... but the dateline for the payment was untill the 1st of July 2007... So we assumed it was a mistake or some kind of mass email in which we were added erroneously; even though we corroborated with our departments secretary and she said it was most probably a mistake. So we kept on with our project, and in the end of May I was informed that I was no longer enrolled in the University and that I had to pay before January 1st 2007!
Obviously I got scared and astonished! So I replied back explaining that there surely was a miss understanding since I was a member of the IT-Master programme and not an Esbjerg student. But their only reply was... Sorry but you should have payed and we have informed the migration office that you are no longer a student here (I am not Danish to make that point clear), and the dateline was December 1st 2006. So this made clear to me that they have no clue of who and when has to pay.
To make the long story short... I am currently unable to graduate from Aalborg University Esbjerg as I wished. The initial agreement was violated, they waited untill we were half way in the semester to let us know that we had to pay in July... but then one month later changed their mind and decided that we had to pay in January and kicked me out of the University without previous announcement. The work for a whole semester is now done for up to now nothing...
It is sad to face this kind of indirect discrimination (indirect discrimination) and even harder to realize that an agreement is not respected, even though they offeres freedom of choice to graduate on the last semester... as long as you have enough money to pay for it.
So please let me know if anyone has a good suggestion as what to do about this situation, because up to now... no answer, solution or option has been given to us on this matter.
Definition: Indirect discrimination involves setting a condition or requirement which a smaller proportion of those with the protected attribute are able to comply with, without reasonable justification.
