Finished

I didn’t meet my goal.   Instead of finishing in 2 years as I had planned, my final credit was completed 2 years and 3 months after I began.  At times during the last two years I did not think I would make it here.   I’m sure anyone going through school can relate to feeling like there is no end in sight somewhere in the middle of the credit count.  One of my coworkers at a previous job would state “keep your head down and your arms moving, the boss will tell when you can go home”.  Staring up at the mountain of work at the beginning of a semester, that advice is perfect…  Limiting my focus to the next assignment and not getting caught up in the amount of work left was vital.

If I find the time I would like to publish a post that goes into detail about how I finished including the different ways I received credit.

Happy to be in America

I’m very appreciative of the fact that I live in this nation.   I can’t imagine life anywhere else.  The opportunities that we take for granted here are not available to the world at large.

Thank you America

Schedule changes

I’m writing in another flurry of posts (2),  because I’ve got a little free time right now.   So I thought I would update the schedule a little bit.  Since the last time I posted on this, a few things have changed. One of them is the certainty with which I feel I will be finished my degree in the middle of June as I originally projected.  This is due to several things, a couple of them personal and one big one being financial.    I will still be done by the end of summer regardless of what happens, but the actual time might be closer to the real end of summer and not the middle of summer as I initially hoped.   One thing that would help me get there on time is completing the exams that I still have outstanding as soon as possible.   The longer those take, the longer I’m going to be waiting to sign up for the last class.

Group Assignment record: 1-2

Another group assignment list, this one multiple questions each week in one of my classes.   I can’t say that this one will negatively affect my grade, but it still isn’t the best setup.  In this case, the group is given a list of 7 or so questions per week, with guidance about how to divvy them up other than that the questions need to be submitted in their entirety by the end of the week.   What has happened so far is that a select few people have completed the assignments while the rest of the “group participants” have turned in the “group’s work” as their own.  Dumb.  Not really the fault of the people who take advantage, but  poor organization of the course that allows them to do it.   It looks like I have a group project in another class, so I will be able to get even more experience with groups. Exciting!

Books for driving… Really.

I posted a while back about trying to study while driving.  That did not work out very well..  But I did recently find a website that posts free audio books for download.  So far I’ve gotten through Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and I’m in the middle of Plato’s Republic.  The format is not as bad as I thought it would be, but a lot of that depends on the reader for each book.  The intonation and reading speed can be variables that cause annoyance after a couple hours.

Best of all, this is a way to redeem some of that time driving back and forth between jobs/school!   I was always saying, “I wish I had an extra hour a day to read for fun.”  Now I have at least an hour, and a decent list of titles to choose from.  Thus far, I’ve been downloading the audio files and ripping them to a CD because I don’t have an MP3 attachment for my car’s stereo.   (It is also helping me eliminate the plethora of disks I have around the house.) For those with the ability to plug your MP3 player into your car stereo, it’s even simpler, just download the tracks and plug in to the car.

Some of the sites I’ve used so far are:

<http://www.learnoutloud.com/content/blog/archives/2009/04/best_free_audio.html>

<http://librivox.org/>

<http://freeclassicaudiobooks.com/>

Besides philosophy, I haven’t found many topics that would directly relate to college courses.  But I haven’t done much looking either.

Working

So far I’ve been staying pretty busy and relatively focused.  It’s going to be fun when it’s all done!   It is really hard for me to believe that this is the final semester.  I’ve been looking forward to this for long time, well before I even started school.  To see the final classes is really a good feeling.  I can still remember, after my first semester as I was looking up at the remaining 125 or so credit hours, just how disheartening it was to think of all of the work yet to be done.  Now, I can look at the final classes on my schedule!  I need to keep this focus going.

It’s 2:30am

At times like this, I hate school.   The assignment I’m working on is already late, I’m tired.  I know that the little work I am getting done is poor.  That means that I’m screwing up the project for my other group-mates. . …….  This is awesome!  I almost forgot to mention, I have to be up for work in about 3.5 hours.  What a week to have to work on Saturday.   Maybe I’m suffering from the  “shift work disorder” discussed on the ridiculous Pandora commercial.

Working in Groups

Horrible.  Nothing like getting hung out to dry the week a project is due.  I spouted off too much about how everyone sounded willing to work .  Now, I’m working on a project, due yesterday, for which my part of the assignment was done a week ago.   Some people have no problem just giving up..  I’m fine with giving up!  But you can at least tell the rest of your team that you’re quitting!

There was only one member of the group who scuttled his part of the work, but it was at the very last minute.  I repeat, groups: Horrible.

Hammered

Ah, I had such high hopes for this term!  Hopes for weekend breaks and stress-free deadlines. I even had plans for daily updates to this blog, detailing the steps of this, my next-to-final semester.  Instead, my lack of planning in this semester has left me fighting for air, week after week.  Instead of efficiently cutting through the water with a front-crawl, my strategy left me barely keeping my nose over the waves of work as they came crashing in over my head.  My struggles began somewhere around week 3 of this semester, but the root cause originated before classes even started.

Being a little overconfident in my studying abilities, I decided to forego my typical planning and task entry for a looser, less structured approach.  (I’m not sure whether this was entirely overconfidence or laziness, either one is bad.) So I didn’t track anything for the first couple weeks.

Wow.

I wasted SO much time.  I spent time re-doing assignments, searching for assignments, wasted time on the road that I could have been studying, and submitted assignments incorrectly, I was more or less clueless for the first quarter of the semester.  Yeah, clueless is just fine for the Beverly Hills teenager, but it’s not the place to be when you have deadlines fast approaching.  Stress levels went up and productivity went down.   There is really nothing like finding out about a big assignment the night before it is due.   Horrible.

In terms of work, this semester contained somewhere around half the amount of work that the last semester did.  The web design class alone probably required as much work as the three classes combined in this semester.  Based on the outcome of this experiment, I will plan rigorously for the upcoming summer semester!

Week 2 March 29 – April 4th

Class	Date	Start	End	Total Study Time(minutes)	Notes
MIS-DB	4/1/2010		1815	15
	4/4/2010		2200	45	Reading

Class	Date	Start	End	Total Study Time(minutes)	Notes
MIS-ProjManage	4/3/2010			125
	4/4/2010			140

Class	Date	Start	End	Total Study Time(minutes)	Notes
BUS-Law	4/2/2010		1224	176
BUS-Law	4/1/2010		1830	20

Class	Date	Start	End	Total Study Time(minutes)	Notes
Programming test	3/29/2010			212
	3/30/2010			215	Studied for exam, then took it.

Total: 15.8 hours (948 minutes)