Thursday, April 26, 2007

Submitted my Application

So, after thinking about this a bit, I've decided to give it a try!

The big thing that won me over is I don't have to choose how many classes I will take in a 6 month period. I pay a flat amount for the 6 months - and then can take and finish as many classes as possible. So I could choose to do 3 classes, finish them in a two months, and take another 2. Or take 6 months to do the 2. Whatever it takes.

As I REALLY hope I'll be able to test out of a majority of the programming classes with some basic work (need to review Java), this means I might able to complete this FAST.

So, I'm waiting to hear back on the next step. Something about Readiness Assessment (which will likely be annoying as I haven't had to do even basic algebra in umm..... 20 years? Wow!), and then pick when to start and pay.

Should be interesting to see how this goes!

Start

So I had a talk with Dave from WGU about enrolling. We've exchanged a few e-mails with my general questions, and he gave me a call this afternoon.

I'm in a odd situation here - I want to get my MBA, but never finished my bachelors. I had about 2.5 years of it, but burned out. Took a year off, started back up again - but then had a great offer for a job programming. I ended up taking it.

While I don't' regret doing that, I'm now stuck having to get the bachelors so I can move on to higher education. I have around 20 years of software dev - everything including just straight writing code, leading teams, leading multiple teams, training people, design, architecture, starting and running a software company, etc.

Most of my past credits move will over to fill the underclass work - so most of this degree will be learning how to program. Something I kinda know how to do.

The upside to all of this is the way WGU works. I could in theory finish this VERY fast, as I just need to, for the most part, take a test to prove I know the subject material. It's all in Java, which is annoying, as I've been doing C++ since the early 90's, and C#/VB.NET the last few years. If it was in either of those I could probably pass most of the straight programming tests cold. :)


Anyway, going to think about it a bit more, see what happens.