"One of the most irritating aspects of Harvard is that each part of the administration seems to have no idea what is going on in the other parts," Hyman wrote in an e-mail. "I spent a lot of time running around between the Core Office, the Advanced Standing Office, and the OCS in order to pull off junior year abroad."

Josephine J. Pavese, the OCS director for study abroad, said the present system represents the careful balance of different departmental interests.

"It's not that offices don't know what other offices are doing, but that each of those offices is part of the academic program here," she said. "They each have a vested interest."

But students say the various offices involved in study abroad programs have made little effort to speed students through the administrative logistics.

"OCS, for instance, did not have the forms needed to apply for Foreign Cultures credit, nor did they have any idea what was needed to qualify for that--so I had to arrange that separately with that office," Hyman said.

"Then I had to go to the Advanced Standing office to discuss how my advanced standing would be affected by junior year abroad, and they in turn had to call up the Core Office to see how many cores I would have to take on returning to Harvard...I felt like I was going in circles after a while," Hyman continues.

Pavese argues that such bureaucratic division is necessary for good advising.

"The Core office can give good information on what constitutes Foreign Cultures credit. They are the people with the most information," she said. "Providing forms [at OCS] is not the same as receiving the guidance of that office which is most invested in that part of the Harvard education."

Bureaucratic Woes

Another problem for students has been that the Standing Committee on Study Out of Residence meets only once per month. The Committee must approve all requests to receive academic credit for study abroad.

Gaston de los Reyes '96, a Crimson editor, says he decided last October that he wanted to spend the past semester at Oxford.

"I found that I'd been accepted by Oxford in November," de los Reyes says. "The way the process works at Harvard, I didn't find out that I'd get credit until December even though the program I was applying to was on the list of approved programs."

"I was planning to leave four weeks later. That made it difficult to plan things--I wouldn't go unless I could get credit," de los Reyes continues.

"If you want to study in a program that's been approved, it seems sort of absurd that it should have to go to a standing committee that only meets once a month. The study abroad office should be able to approve it if the person meets certain guidelines," Reyes says.

The administrative problem does not seem to lie in any one department, but rather in the lack of coordination in the approval process.