5 posts tagged “school”

I was psyched to start summer semester.  I had registered for two courses - 1 10-week course on argumentative writing, and 1 5-week course on grammar.  Tonight I took my first grammar course and got a whopping 56.  Technically, I got a 58, then retested thanks to the professor's excellent plan of allowing us to take each test twice and then using our higher scores, and got a 54 on the second version.  I studied for that bitch for 8 and a half hours yesterday, and another two hours today. 

I couldn't get a handle on the basics, which SUCKS.  Immeasurable levels of suck, in fact.  It is so incredibly frustrating that I couldn't get a handle on an adjective clause.  Or a goddamned ADVERB.  Truth be told, if the class wasn't required for my major I wouldn't be in it, but since it is (and more on that in a minute), immediately after dropping it, I registered for the fall section.

I started thinking about this a couple of days ago - I don't know if I want to continue down the path of Communications Studies.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I want to commit myself to Computer Applications.  I'm not exactly a designer, I don't know how to make stuff (i.e. software) look pretty.  What am I gonna do, fix other people's shit?

Hopefully the fall section will be better, it won't be as intense, I'll have more study time, etc etc etc.  And if it doesn't work in the Fall, it's off to trade school I go!  I always wanted to weld, Flashdance-stylee.

I wish that I had taken Daylight Savings Time in to account when I concocted my "go to bed an hour early/wake up an hour early" pro school plan.  Cause I'm pretty damn wide awake, and my count I should have been asleep 8 minutes ago.

In other news, I finally settled on my education plan.  I'm aiming for a bachelor's in Communication Studies (my plan was always something comm-related, whether it was Comm Studies, Mass Comm, or just Communications) and a certification in "Internet Technologies" - site management and design, development, Java, Perl, etc etc.  It only requires 18 credits, and there's no equivalent minor, so that's what I'm looking at.

Of course, the specifics of this all hinges on me remaining a resident of Maryland.  The plans will have to change as my residency does, because my number two goal of college-ing is to not have any student loans.

Also, after 28 years of being alive, I have finally narrowed down what I want to do with my life - "something to do with the Internets and the people on the other ends of the tubes."  I liked working at the dotcom where I spent that 18 months in 99/2000 (98/99?  I don't remember), even though I was a peon making a paltry (in comparison) $25K a year and the site was purchased and shuttered before we even went public.  And two of my current projects at work are working with eDiaries and Alternative Audio diaries, both of which are super fascinating to me.

But I may have found the secret to time management for this semester.  I'm lucky enough to have a boss who understands both my distaste for my immediate surroundings at work (remember back when an office in a converted warehouse seemed so cool and urban?  When that phenomenon hit the suburbs and the office parks, it lost its appeal) and my desire to not work a regular 9-5 shift.  I've been working 12 - 8 for the last three years, and it's been fantastic, but when I switched to an online environment for school in January, I was finding it hard to work, do school, and have a life.  I stumbled on the solution - go to bed an hour earlier, wake up an hour earlier, and use the MORNINGS for school instead of the evenings.  Brilliant!  I hope.

I have a psych exam due in 4 hours.  I don't know where the week went, but I'm not even done with my first read-through of the chapter, much less the study points that are given to us.  My tests are due EVERY Sunday and ALWAYS at 3, I don't know what in the hell happened this week to make me so behind but that has to change.

And yes, I'm bitching about it in a blog post before I even open the book again.   I realize how retarded that is.  I've promised myself a trip to World Market when I'm done, I just have to get off my proverbial ass and actually TCB for once this week.

I've been working on my Bachelor's thanks to assistance from my employer's tuition reimbursement program.  The way that the program works (used to, at least) is you would pick a degree, have it approved based on some set of business rules regarding how good an investment it would be for the company to make, and they would reimburse you for all of your classes after satisfactory completion.  After your degree got approved, you'd send a form to them at the beginning of each semester outlining the courses you were planning to take, so that they would know what you're up to and what they'd have to budget for. 

On deck for the upcoming spring semester are US History From 1865 - Present and Psych 101.  I sent my approval form and got an email back saying that Psych would be approved but History would not.  Something was fishy, so I wrote back and asked why I had to get my degree approved if they're going to nix classes that are in my degree program.  Apparently, two years ago they went from a degree program based system to an individual course based system. 

One more time - "Apparently," and TWO YEARS AGO.  I've been taking classes on and off (mostly off) for three years.

I just searched my inbox for all of the emails relating to school, and there was no notification.  This just goes along with the time that they decided to stop paying school fees (you know, the consolidated fee, lab fee, parking fee, the $200 - $400 per semester which you just can't account for at the end of the day, but you sure do have to pay it, even if you don't drive,  take lab courses, or consolidate anything).  That was a nice surprise from them.

I really extra love the fact that my HR department has the nerve to call itself "Organization Effectiveness."