done! well, kinda...

i've been to so many universities and have so many credits and still don't have my degree. i think i'm close to 155 credits now. i started at u of a right out of high school and it's just gone down hill... whoops, progressed from there. i was coming close to finishing it from university of phoenix and was actually surprised, because i was learning a heckuva lot more there than i thought i would. i've heard horror stories about it being a degree mill and what not, and i hated the group work in the first couple of classes until i settled in with a great group, but in hindsight alot of it has been applicable to stuff i'm doing everyday. and more importantly, once i finally got a good group, i learned a ton from those guys. anyways, before i could finish it off 9/11 happened and i was mobilized. i moved campuses with phoenix, but then word came down that i was getting deployed. so i switched schools again, this time to one that the military education center recommended for making distance education easy for deployed troops.

things have gone fairly well with the new school, but the whole "self paced" thing is an exercise in self-discipline, in which i'm severely lacking. the first couple semesters flew by. when i was in afghanistan i was with a 3 man team, and we were all fairly self-contained guys. we had no power and pretty much no distractions. it was in areas that i was comfortable with and i had to stretch some, but not tons. then i hit my first tough class. "data structures" which were defined with the aid of "c". not "visual c" but "c". a programming language that i'd touched very briefly over a decade ago and hated. all of a sudden my progress came to a screeching halt. i think i asked for 3 different extentions for that class. i had to teach myself the programming language so i could understand the examples from the text. and i was back in the states and distracted like crazy. i actually had to get deployed to iraq to be able to focus on it. those days when i hated everyone and needed to get away from them, i just found a quiet corner and chewed through the course.

this weekend i finished my trig/analytical algebra course. it's been almost 8 months in the working. the first couple chapters flew by. angles and stuff come up frequently in everyday life and i remember alot of that. but the end. *ugh* painful. trying to teach myself that has pretty much turned my brain to tapiocca. the text blew. i learned SO much more from the "algebra for dummies" "algebra II for dummies" and "trigonometry for dummies" than i ever learned from the text book. and all three of those books cost less than the official text. but it's done. (i think, i still haven't gotten all my coursework graded and returned). then a semester final exam, two more classes, another semester final and i'm done. the end is sight. of course it has been, for like the last 2 years, but life keeps interupting. as does my inclination to put the book down and step away when it gets to be too hard.

it's no huge accomplishment. people finish courses and get degrees all the time. but i definately think if i continue on for a grad degree i've got to switch back to a more traditional learning environment. the self-paced thing really requires alot of focus which i'm not known for and it's really nice to have an instructor readily available when things get tough. i've had some awful teachers over the years, and this experience hasn't changed my view of them. but i've had some great ones too, and i hope i let them know.

hope everyone had a great weekend!