When I decided to go back to school, I was 30 years old and had not attended college since I was 19. I was working in IT since I was 21 and had worked my way up through several different jobs to the point where I was an Operations Supervisor at a market data company with over 1500 employees.
In addition to skills which were self-taught and things I learned on the job, I took a few certification courses on my own and attended several training sessions at work in addition to many eLearning courses my employer offers which I took online.
There were several times when I felt the desire to go back to school and get my degee but I never got around to it because of one excuse or another. I'm not sure what made me decide to finally just do it and start taking classes but eventually I did and applied to CUNY and decided to start taking classes at BMCC.
The hardest thing to do was to figure out how to get into the habit of studying in my free time rather than just doing whatever I wanted after work. Luckily I was able to get a few very engaging professors and some very smart and hard-working fellow students who helped inspire me to get into those habits early. I finished my time at BMCC in Spring 2008 with a 3.6 GPA.
In the Fall of 2008, I entered Baruch and while my first semester was very challenging, I was able to do reasonably well and finish with a 3.23 GPA.
This semester I am taking four classes: Philosphy 1500, Management 3120, English 4300 and Anthropology 1001. This is not going to be an easy semester because in addition to the 12 credits, I am still working full time. Basically, my week looks like this: I work in New Jersey each day from 6am to 2pm. After work, I am generally home by 3pm and head straight to Baruch. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I can study at school for a couple hours until my first class at 5:50pm. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to my first class at 4:10 and then I have a 2 hour break until my late class. Every night, Monday through Thursday, I finish at about 9pm and get home around 9:30. I usually eat and get to bed as early as I can because I have to wake up by about 5am.
So where does this leave time for my wife, my friends, my family, exercise, movies, TV, etc? It generally doesn't, except for on the weekends. The key is to get ahead of schedule on schoolwork, do the big projects ahead of time and to always keep in mind that school is important and a high GPA is important and that this will all be worth it when I'm done.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment