Dear Mom and Dad,

I just wanted to drop you this line about my summer adventures here at UTM.

As always, the professors were great and the staff helpful and interested in answering questions and helping me advance in my college experience but as in life, there are bumps in the road.

No, not my grades, they were great but in a few other areas. One was the great state of Tennessee running out of time to settle on a budget.

We were out of school an extra week during the second session so it was an adventure finishing up my classes.

The next was the raise in tuition costs. Even though the state projects a two percent increase in revenue, they raised tuition seven and a half percent.

Plus it’s going to cost more for a sticker to park. I guess we need to repave some of the parking lots around here and offset the cost.

My last interesting experience was that the university decided to outsource the management of the bookstore.

The new company made some “mistakes” by raising the cost of our books but they assured me that they would fix the problem.

The good thing is that they hired a bunch of students to help with the transition of raising the prices.

The other day, I took my Summer II books over to trade them in and I was told that they were only giving wholesale prices. I guess that means that I could get back about $10 for the $143 worth of books I just bought there after the new company took over.

Two of the books are still in use and the other has a new edition coming out. So I walked over to the off campus bookstore and got back $47 for the same books.

While I was there, I compared prices and found out that I could save money on my books for the fall.

Since I’m taking 20 hours I’ll save $50.

A couple of other firiends have checked and one of them can save $54.05 on her books and the other over $80 on his. But, the off campus bookstore was checking prices so I guess I better buy my books quickly...

Don Sims is a senior education major from Dyer.