I’m no stranger to column etiquette. This introduction is where I’m supposed to tell who I am and lure you in with a funny joke so you feed on my words like Skittles for the rest of the semester.

But something is irking me, so I’ll give you the abridged introduction/joke:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because my name is Jordan Wilson.

With common column courtesy checked off, let’s get down to it.

As a last-semester senior, I am chasing graduation down like it smells of steak. The first step for many of us was to fill out our graduation applications, which are due today in Woody Hall.

I budgeted about 15 minutes to complete this step, figuring I would drop off the paper, fill out a form for verification and show some form of identification.

Wrong.

I dropped my application in a tray. Fifteen minutes wasn’t even 15 seconds.

So why bring it up? Shorter is better. Time is money. Right?

Yeah, but the graduation application is troubling.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of shortcuts, jay walking and not crossing my T’s. But something was just not right about placing my future in an easily accessible tray.

Before you roll your eyes about my complaint, chew on this: If you don’t turn your application in by today, you don’t graduate.

This tray is in the open. Any student could walk up, slyly grab any applications in the tray and walk away. Voila – you don’t graduate.

Again, this is troubling. I’m not so much worried about my application getting hijacked. I’m just befuddled by the grade school setup.

This is a university. This is the same university that requires you to change your SIU e-mail password every third day and calls for 17 different symbols in the password.

I’m not kicking up dirt here. I’m just scratching my head, wondering why the university we pay tens of thousands of dollars requires us to put such an important slip of paper in a vulnerable spot.

I dropped mine off Thursday. An hour later, I returned to Woody Hall to soothe my uneasy feeling.

“I just wanted to double check that you guys have my application,” I said.

The lady behind the desk said that wasn’t possible. There was a massive stack of applications and they weren’t in order.

She smiled at me and said as long as I dropped my application in the tray, it wouldn’t get lost.

Here’s to hoping she was right.

Wilson is a senior studying journalism.