Need your help or legal advice due to a college matter.?
Question by Civic07: Need your help or legal advice due to a college matter.?
First id like to thank you for reading my question, i am kinda of stuck between this problem. So lets start off, I go to college at DeVry University in North Brunswick NJ. Every potential graduate takes a class called Senior Project where a group of students accomplishes tasks or helps a small business out. So me and my group(2 other friends) helped a small business redesign a business’s website. This is the current website which we made “http://www.allurecustom.com”. The website came a long way from what it was in September which was crap. We have NOT been paid for this its essentially interning or a volunteer work for the clients. We handed over the project on October 25, and the clients loved it & the professor gave us a grade. One of the members of the group already graduated that time.
So now starting from November to December we get emails stating that the client needs our help, because they are very computer illiterate. Now mind you i have now 2 jobs now and I’m take of my work and family. The client needs help doing modifications to the website. I clearly state that i can only do what time permits, because now i have my responsibility of work, and school. So i go out of my way and create a screen recording and show them software which we used to create the website. Visual Studio 2010 in this case. So i emailed them the tutorial, thinking that I’m helping them out, and they should be thankful. We i don’t know what kicks in, probably greed. Then they say they need me to “work” on their site, because they don’t want to buy the software. I clearly told them, i will do what i can, but i make no promises.
Upon hearing that, i presume they get angry, and now i get emails from a professor stating that they want to take “case” to the dean of the college, this infuriates me, knowing that we helped them out, and spend so much time and effort creating this beautiful website. I specifically tell the professor, that we DID NOT SIGN A CONTRACT STATING ” THAT WE WILL WORK FOR THE CLIENT WHEN THE PROJECT IS OVER”. (sorry for the caps, but i want to prove a point). She told me, that i have to listen to the client and help them out. I basically blow it off, because of my current conditions with full time work and full time school, and don’t return the calls, but i do have all send all the email which the clients sent us, regarding our project.
This Saturday i have to meet with the dean of the school, i know he is going to talk about the project, If he states that ” i cant graduate this summer,” because of this, i will seriously loose it. I was suppose to graduate this month, but due to troubles and the college mandated me to take extra classes (another topic which i don’t want to get into right now). What should i do, I’m really torn apart, can i hire “lawyers” to help me out, or should i handle this by myself. Not being able to graduate even though the professor graded me in his class, and the grades are already posted, and i did all my required classes. I’m seriously loosing it, please help or advice me, I REALLY NEED YOUR HELP.
Thank you for listening to me.
Regards;
Akshay Varma.
I forgot to mention, that we handed them, a user manual on how to modify the website, and sat with and told them, if they needed extra help, to read an ASP.NET book, or hire a website developer. We are just college kids, not professionals by means. From applying the skills we learned in the ASP.NET class, and basic/intermediate HTML knowledge, created the website.
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Short of a contract, you have no legal obligation to help this business for free after the project. The Dean is probably just going to try and guilt you into it, just know you have no legal obligation to comply nor can they legally deny your graduation as a result of this scenario, especially since you’ve already gotten a grade, class has ended. It’s absurd this business thinks you’re going to continually work for free and provide web support, screw them.
Don’t fall for the Dean’s guilt trip and if he mentions something about effecting you graduation, just tell him you’ll have a lawyer on this so quick it will make his head spin. Again, by no means are you obligated to provide additional support for free or even at all. If you don’t have the time just let it go, if you do just tell them they need to pay you, the free internship has ended.
Note – the Dean may try and offer you school monies to complete the project, merely to shut this company up.
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