Poor Communication On All Fronts:

Poor Communication On All Fronts:

Resting a handful of degrees beneath Ivy League, GWU is a lovely and relatively prestigious institution.

What is not lovely about it is communicating with anyone. When placing a phone call, expect long waits with several mechanical menus of options to surf through before selecting an option for live humans.

The employees are pleasant enough when you get them on the phone -
in a rather Stepford manner - but lack any sort of actual knowledge. They know just enough to direct you to a website or an email, but when asked pointed questions about applications, requirements, etc. they casually curl up and admit defeat before weakly providing yet another email or number to call.

I spent approximately 3 hours on the phone being shunted from department to department, desperately trying to figure out how to log onto a Student Portal to apply for classes. A call into Admissions would be directed to IT, then transferred back to Admissions, then to Registrars, then to the Department I was applying to and back again, with no one actually knowing who to send me to and all employees politely divesting themselves of any responsibility to get to the heart of the issue. Instead they would calmly yet firmly indicate, "That's not really my department. Here, I'll transfer you to someone who might know something about it."

Occasionally, I would run into a dead end of a voicemail, and with no ability to select a new option, would need to dial in again to begin the process all over.

Overall, an extremely frustrating experience. Somewhat like calling your cable company and waiting in line at the Secretary of State/ DMV all rolled into one.