This is a series on my NYSC experience. Each part will be posted as experienced. Hope you enjoy.
Salam Guys,
So I’m at that point in every Nigerian graduate’s life where some dread and others are excited about.. yep you guessed it. The NYSC PHASE.
I recently completed my masters(Alhamdulilah) and because I plan on working and settling in Nigeria, I have to serve my father land( as they put it).
I’m one of the many people you will meet that never fails to voice out her dislike for the NYSC scheme. I’ve been praying fervently for it to be scrapped as far back as I can remember. But here I am almost 10 years later registering and preparing to be a part of something I dislike.
Thankfully I found a lot of useful information online from people sharing their experiences and I thought if this was useful to me, why not share mine and have someone come across it who finds it useful too.
So I’m going to be doing this in phases starting off with my online registration process till when it’s finally over, and then share as I experience each phase.
The first thing I did was constantly check the NYSC website for news of the Batch B 2016 registration date and after almost a month of constant checking, they released a timetable for our batch. I noted the day the online registration was going to take place and I made available all the documents required to be uploaded(this is available on the NYSC website) and kept them in a folder on my laptop.
On the day of the registration, I woke up at 12 a.m (more like my mum woke me up because i could not be bothered with stressing myself over something I wasn’t interested in in the first place). Yes, 12am because according to my mum, it was better to register immediately the portal opened.
Anyways, woke up, checked the website and there was nothing related to online registration on the website. Considering I had slept at about 10pm, I was so pissed that I had shortened my sleep only to be disappointed. Anyways, I made sure my mum saw there was nothing on the website before she decided to wake me up every hour to check… and then I peacefully had my beauty sleep.
A few hours later, the portal was finally opened and I created an account. I had to wait for almost an hour for an e-mail confirmation to be sent to me, was mad about this till I found out later that a few others had to wait longer. Afterwards, I was required to pay about 3,000 naira for getting my call up letter sent to me when it was ready.
Filling in information was next.
Mind you… one of the requirements for registration was thumb printing and I didn’t have the thumb print scanner so that meant I had to go to a cyber café. I was only doing all these other steps myself so that when I got to the café which I was sure was going to be filled up, it wouldn’t be as stressful. Anyways, I got to the phase where I had to upload my picture and this became a problem. We were required a particular size and apparently I wasn’t getting it right. After several attempts, I gave up and packed my things in search of a cyber café.
The first cyber cafe i went to, the guy incharge was helping about four other people, and I thought four isn’t so much i’ll just wait. However, I’m a very impatient person and waiting has to be one of my top 10 pet peeves so after about 30minutes of waiting I got tired and left the place on the haunt for another café.
I went to other cafes but they were either all full or were not doing Nysc registration. I then decided to look up cyber cafes online and I came across a website that had provided a list of Nysc approved cyber cafes and this particular café was part of the list.
First, this place was at the far back of a building one wouldn’t guess had shops in it. Second, it was on the last floor. And because I was desperate to get the registration over with, I went in and to say that it was nothing to write home about would be an understatement (I regret not taking a picture now).
The man incharge mentioned he had been doing Nysc registration and was really good at it(I didn’t ask him). He spent almost an hour trying and failing to upload my picture and his conclusion was that it was probably because I had my hijab on in the picture. I pretended as if I didn’t hear what he had said at first and then my mum’s driver who was with me repeated what he had said to me. I didn’t even have to say anything, but the look I gave him…
To cut the long story short, we left the place in search for others and finally found a place that was able to help and I completed the registration after almost 6hrs of struggle.
So.. Here are a few tips from my registration experience I think will be useful to prospective corpers that come across this:
1. Before the day of the registration, Look out for cyber cafes. A good café will fill everything out for you(with you giving them the information of course) in no time and you’ll have to pay as cheap as one or two thousand naira.
2. Get all your documents scanned and ready in a flash drive before going.
3. Complete almost half of the login process before going to a café.
4. Or better still get the scanner yourself and fill everything out.
Hope this helps.
I’m currently documenting my camp experience which ended a few weeks back. Once that’s done, I’ll be sure to share.
Have a fab day 🙂
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