Thread by @obasaolorunfemi

I am thinking to do a thread of the wildest things that happen in northern #Cyprus universities.

Very crazy stuff! 🤣🤦🏾‍♂️

1. A student had 100% scholarship. Between the dept handling the scholarship and the finance dept, one didn’t notify the other before the registration period expired. So the student got charged by the school for late registration fees and interests on the debts accrued. 🤦🏾‍♂️

2. Dorms are typically a mess in most Unis, most students (esp from Africa) opt out of the dorms after the first semester. A student who opted out of the dorm lost her 100% scholarship immediately. There was no warning beforehand & no notice after it was done either.

3. One uni terminated scholarships for the students in the middle of the lockdown with no notice/ warning to the students beforehand and then started to charge interests on the debts piling up. Most students didnt know until months later.

4. A Uni de-registered and un-enrolled the entire school in one day in an attempt to fish out debtors in the middle of a semester, before a test and in a pandemic. Then tried to fix it by re-enrolling others back but lots of students got enrolled in the wrong courses.

5. One uni refused to issue certificate to a PhD student because according to them, their accounts department had been giving the wrong fees to the student to pay for the last 2 years (Just 🤦🏾‍♂️) and now they are determined to collect their balance, else no certificate.

6. In some Unis, when you owe rent at the dorms, the uni blocks your student portal until you pay but when the dorms owe you a refund, the Uni would say “they are a different organization”. Needless to say, getting any kind of refund from most Unis is literally impossible.

7. Some Unis charge students “dental insurance” as part of fees even though the students also pay premiums for healthcare and taxes to the govt when obtaining their resident permits every year. Owo yii shaaaa! 🤣

8. As an intending student, if you tweet or email the uni you applied to, you are not likely to get a response at all because the Unis assume you are coming via an “agent”. If they do respond, the information is barely enough. You are left at the mercy of your “agent”.

9. If you pay for fees in foreign currency (which you are supposed to do), some unis convert that money to the local currency (turkish lira) using their (internal) rates and then convert it back to their preferred currency (Euro) using their own rates. So its usually less. Sigh!

10. One uni could not trace the payments records of a student for nearly 2 years. They demanded that the student forfeit that current program (she was in her 3rd yr) and start all over.

11. Some unis have lost original copies of transcripts, certificates, high school results et al belonging to students before they graduated. The students had to replace these documents at personal cost after graduation.

Intermission: Thinking of coming to school in northern #Cyprus? Read the below first:

See the entire process of getting enrolled in a university in northern #Cyprus here: link.medium.com/qfXsnCvYybb

12. If you have any kind of scholarship in most unis, the school debits you at 0% scholarship first, you then head to registration where someone brings out a calculator to figure out your real fees and then attempt to credit you a balance that can only be used for another course.

13. Accounting systems are so opaque & poor that It is common place for people to give testimonies in church that they graduated w/o any debt magically appearing from somewhere just when you are on the crux of graduation.

14. One uni lost their @TEDx license because they couldn’t bring themselves to follow Tedx’s terms and conditions. How hard could that have been really? Zero efforts were made to get it back since then.