Before the solution stands a doorkeeper: Kafkaesque Bureaucracy at University 

One morning, when I tried to access a basic university service, I found myself transformed into the last competent administrator on campus. 

Kafka’s world is one where the rules are arbitrary. The logic is circular, and the system exists only to sustain itself. It is also characterised as absurd and surreal. For students tangled in university bureaucracy, this system is all too real. A simple task becomes an administrative nightmare, where students chase elusive answers from figures who refuse to help, defer responsibility, or simply don’t exist — or might as well not.

The T(uto)rial

Have you ever had to change your tutorial time? 

It should be simple. You check the timetable, realise there’s a clash and, like any reasonable person, you favourite a different tutorial and hope the system will magically allocate you to it. This, of course, does not happen. A week passes, census date arrives, and your timetable remains unchanged. You are — officially — stuck.

You navigate to the Adjusting Timetables help page on the university website, which thankfully acknowledges some clashes need to be fixed even after census date — only to get your hopes crushed by a message that says you simply should’ve fixed it earlier. There is no solution. You file an enquiry in the service portal and wait. 

Days pass. Then weeks. You consider writing your question on parchment, rolling it into a scroll, and attaching it to the leg of a carrier pigeon. This would surely be faster.

Then, at long last, a response arrives. It is a triumph of bureaucracy, forwarded through so many hands that the original message is barely visible beneath an ocean of “See below” and “Please advise.” You scroll past signatures, disclaimers, and unnecessary pleasantries, only to discover the final verdict: “We recommend contacting your course faculty for further assistance.”

With no other options, you email your tutors, who in a rare act of academic mercy tell you to just attend the tutorial that fits your schedule. You happily do so and join a group project, settling in. Finally, a win.

But then, the course coordinator finds out and you’ve accidentally started a week-long email chain with no satisfactory conclusion. Suddenly, the tutorial you’ve been attending is no longer an option. No, you must return to the one you were originally allocated to. Why? Because of rules. What rules? No one can answer. Maybe because your personal scheduling crisis is nothing compared to the integrity of the almighty university timetable. You are torn from your group and reassigned to a class that you now resent with every fibre of your being. Somewhere deep in the university’s admin offices, a hand updates a spreadsheet. Order is restored.

The Claim

The beauty of university bureaucracy is that it’s not just academic matters that become an endless maze of inefficiency — it extends into your basic health needs too. 

International students are required to have Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC), a policy set up by the university for students. Simple enough, right? Wrong. Once you actually need to use it, you discover that no one — not the university, not the health center, and certainly not you — actually understands how it works. 

It starts at the medical centre, where you book your procedure and, after the initial price shock, you remember you are just so freaking lucky to have an OSHC to cover it. Naturally, you ask if your OSHC covers the procedure you need. The extraordinarily informed secretary looks at you confused, having heard (perhaps for the first time in recorded history) the words “Overseas Student Health Cover”. Of course, she doesn’t have that information, but she gives you an email you can ask. After rejecting her recommendation, you drag yourself to the oh-so-very conveniently located Bupa just a minute away from the Health Center. 

You explain your situation and get sympathetic nods, as if the OSHC representative were about to bestow upon you all the answers. As it turns out, they don’t actually know if your procedure is covered. What they do know is how to file a claim if it is covered, which is, of course, a completely separate issue.

But before you even think about filing that claim, you need an itemised invoice (obviously.) So, back to the medical center you go — thankfully, just a minute away. It’s almost as if the university knew this would be an issue and strategically placed the two offices next to each other. Of course, rather than using this knowledge to streamline the process, they simply sat back and let the bureaucratic relay race unfold as nature intended.

The secretary greets you with the same blank stare as before. You explain that Bupa requires an itemised invoice. She quickly responds, “Oh, we don’t issue itemised invoices”. OH???? 

And so, after a wasted hour, you find yourself with two options: pay out of pocket, or start fresh at an external clinic and pray you don’t get sent on yet another futile quest. 

You cancel your appointment, but don’t worry — even if they did issue the itemised invoice, you wouldn’t be able to attend anyway because the new tutorial you were forced into is at the time of your appointment. 

By now, it’s about more than just the money or the wasted time. It’s about the principle. Fighting the good fight against a system designed to make you feel insane. 

You consider writing a formal complaint, or demanding accountability. You consider dropping out of university and joining a circus. 

Instead, you sigh, accept defeat, and make peace with the fact that bureaucracy always wins. You become Lara K. Or just K. Our names are reduced to a letter, unimportant and interchangeable in a system that doesn’t care to know us. We stop questioning the absurdity and simply accept the bureaucratic cycle, regardless of understanding. We stop asking why things are the way they are. We just accept that they are.

15 Quick and Easy Steps to Resolve a University Issue:

1. Check the university website. 
2. Find three different ‘Contact Us’ pages, all of which contradict each other.
3. Choose at random one of the email addresses you find. 
4. Receive an automated reply directing you to a FAQ page that doesn’t answer your question. 
5. Email the next address. 
6. Find out this is ‘not within their scope’ and get forwarded to another office.
7. Combine flour and baking powder in a separate bowl. 
8. Add to the wet ingredients and mix well until smooth. 
9. That office finally CCs someone who might be able to help.
10. That person is on leave for personal matters. 
11. Wait a week.
12. Pour batter into the prepared cake pan.
13. Smack yourself in the head with the cake pan. 
14. Reconsider all your life choices.
15. Write an article about it.

So, my final piece of advice: when you search up your next university problem on Google and are inevitably confronted with the university website, save yourself the time and effort and just scroll a little lower to find the Reddit thread. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the university’s best source of information is a second-year student with a laptop and a grudge.