Someone asked about my degree plans in a comment on an earlier post, so I thought I’d expand a little on my educational background and plans.
I first enrolled in college 24 years ago, but I was going because it was expected of me, not because I especially wanted to do it. I wasn’t very motivated and didn’t do much studying. I got As and Bs my first semester, but things went quickly downhill from there. I ended up with a 2.54 GPA for 33 units of course work.
For quite a while I’ve thought that if I ever went back to school, that I’d either like to get a Bachelor’s degree in a field other the Computer Science, or get a Master’s degree in CS. I’m told that there are some programs that will admit students seeking a Master’s degree without having a Bachelor’s degree, based on life experience and such, but I expect that getting into such a program would probably be difficult.
This past fall, I found out that the University of Illinois at Springfield offers an online undergraduate CS program. As far as I’ve been able to determine, they are the only “real” university to do so. There are a few other accredited institutions that have such programs, but the ones I investigated did not really appear to have a very good cirriculum. The UIS program has the same cirriculum as their traditional on-site program, and the University of Illinois is a reasonably well-respected institution, so I decided that I’d apply there for the Bachelor’s degree in CS with a minor in Mathematics.
I’m attending Mission College in Santa Clara, CA in order to fill in the general education requirements necessary for admission to the UIS CS degree program.
In the Spring 2006 semester, I took three four-unit courses:
- CIS 043 Java Programming/CIS 183 Java Programming Lab
- MATH 004A Intermediate Calculus (the third semester of the Analytic Geometry/Calculus series, covering multivariate calculus)
- MATH 019 Discrete Mathematics
Although I expected to do well in the courses (provided that I studied), I was quite surprised to find how much I enjoyed them. Now that I’m really doing this for no other reason than my own personal enrichment and satisfaction, my level of motivation is much higher than it ever was in school before. I did have to spend quite a bit of time studying, especially for Calculus, but I found it to be a lot of fun, and managed to get an A in Java and an A- in each of the math courses. (Mission doesn’t have plusses and minuses on their official grades, so all three count as As, for a 4.0 GPA for the semester.) I’d expected to get reasonably good grades, but given how difficult I found the Calculus final exam, I was worried that it might pull my final grade down to a B or even a C, so I was quite relieved when the grade was posted.