JonCellini.com » School

The longest journey

Jon — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 06:16:03 +0000

Yesterday I completed my final undergraduate course. After attending three different colleges off and on again over the span of the last eight years I am finally a college graduate.

My final capstone course had us reflect on our college experience. When I look back on my own experience I must say it took considerably longer than I had thought it would. There were a few detours along the way and I did my share of bitching and procrastinating but ultimately the experience was worth it. Along the way I learned more than I would admit and grew quite a bit as a person. I find I am a much better student eight years later then when I was fresh out of high school.

While I have finished all of my undergraduate courses there are still a few formalities I need to go through until I receive my diploma. I have an outstanding bill for a credit I need to pay and some various forms to complete before the University of Phoenix will send me my degree. I figure that I will get around to taking care of all that soon.

Right now I am just relieved to not have to come home every night and work on classes. I started this final stab at college back in August of 2001 so it has been a while since I haven’t had anything else to do after work. I’m looking forward to having some downtime for a change.

I am considering continuing on and going for a graduate degree. I am on the fence right now so I figure that I will take the summer off either way and then make a decision on what to do. If I do decide to go who knows how long it will take me.

Oh the humanity

Jon — Fri, 14 May 2004 08:14:13 +0000

I finished all of the coursework for my major on Wednesday. While going over the forms to graduate and receive my diploma I notice that I am short 1 humanities credit from meeting my graduation requirement. Fortunately my academic counselor was able to place me in a course that will fulfill this requirement. In less than seven weeks I will have finally completed my long journey towards a college degree.

Grades

Jon — Sun, 06 Apr 2003 05:57:20 +0000

I received a final grade of an A- for my last course so any hopes of graduating with a 4.0 GPA have been dashed. Granted at this stage in my life I’m more concerned with actually assimilating knowledge so my … Continue reading →

Availability

Jon — Thu, 03 Apr 2003 03:01:55 +0000

Sometimes it seems everything conspires against you.

Tonight is the last night of my current class and I am trying to collaborate with my learning team to complete our group assignment. Of course the servers that support the online classroom have been going up and down all night which makes this rather difficult. I should have anticipated this since a deadline is looming. You would think with all of the money I pay in tuition they could build a decent infrastructure.

In addition my DNS host is experiencing two simultaneous network issues which happens to make both of the authoritative nameservers for my domains inaccessible to the rest of the Internet.

Joy.

Class

Jon — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 06:47:17 +0000

I just finished my last programming course. Honestly, I’m glad to have it behind me.

I should have my final grade by Sunday.

Editors

Jon — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 06:13:44 +0000

I’m taking a VB course in college right now. As part of the course we have to write and debug a VB based contact management application. You would think that the editor in the IDE would allow you to turn on / off line numbers – unfortunately it does not. Being informed you have a syntax error on a specific line is not terribly helpful when there is no easy way to reference it or search for it.

Fortunately it is pretty easy to just cut / paste the source code into a real editor like vim.

Group Projects

Jon — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 07:14:13 +0000

One of the challenges of online education is working in groups on projects.

I still have yet to find a good way to asynchronously write a paper with people scattered around the globe. Given enough over communication it is possible to minimize the amount of duplication of effort / rework, however, this still isn’t like working in real-time with a team. I guess I need to hit Google and see if there is a CVS like product that can work with MS word documents.

More on Textbooks

Jon — Thu, 16 Jan 2003 05:32:10 +0000

School starts tomorrow and my textbook is on backorder. Hopefully I won’t need it much during the first week of class.

Textbooks

Jon — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 04:39:26 +0000

I must have a mental block when it comes to getting my textbooks on time – I finally ordered mine today for my class that starts in two days. Even with 2 day shipping I don’t expect to have it on time since UPS never seems to leave packages the first time even when I ask them to do so.

I really need to try and order my books earlier in the future.

Class is over

Jon — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 05:51:46 +0000

I just finished another course tonight so I am one step closer to having my B.S. degree completed. I enjoy having five week (seven days a week) courses since even if it is a subject I can’t stand it goes by pretty quick.

Now on to a much appreciated one week break