So here’s the thing: I’m a California community college with a 3.7 GPA and got straight As’ for Fall 2015 semester, and was subsequently admitted as an undergraduate transfer student to UC Berkeley, Irvine, and Davis.
Spring semester didn’t go quite as well. I was laid off in December and had to prioritize my job search to avoid homelessness (I’m permanently estranged from my family), which set me back a little, but I still pulled off two Bs and an A in my other classes by the end of the semester while working my hardest.
The catch was costume design: a class I signed up for specifically to give myself one easy class with nothing to do with my major while everything else went off the rails, and attended all of the classes and completed all the assignments. The final, however, was worth at least 50% of my grade, and as I had three other finals on the same day, forgot the cost documentation half of my costume project at home. The teacher said that final grades would be entered by that afternoon, and gave me a C for creativity but could not allow any more nor would she allow any e-mails after that afternoon. As I was very tired and knew I wouldn’t even be home until late evening, I accepted this and hoped that at best this would even out into a B on my transcript, at worst it would become a C and maybe I could lose Berkeley admission.
That class stayed blank on my transcript for two weeks until today, when I found that the grade was posted as an “I”/“Incomplete” and I am still trying to figure out why. I’ve tried to reach my professor or my cc’s admissions department but haven’t gotten any response, and the admissions departments of Berkeley/Irvine/Davis have only been able to offer a vague, indefinite “it depends on what that means to your cc/our admissions committee.”
Please let me know if this means one or all of my applications will be rescinded, what my next steps should be, and how I can sum this up in my updates to the admissions department while being brief enough/explaining the whole situation (that I myself don’t fully understand yet)/possibly saving myself if I can. Thanks in advance!