It’s Monday August 4th, 2025. I have a few things I want to talk about, including completing the Fit check that I skipped this past Friday, August 1st. The rest is about my academic and career situation.
Okay, first up but perhaps least important for the day – The Fit is Good. No real big updates here, and things are generally trending in the correct direction… which is down, for now, when it comes to weight. The rest of the things are also in line with the plan – I’m continuing my walks and converting some of those to increasingly longer and/or more intensive running sessions. To follow up from a recent Fit Check, I’m still not getting in as many or as intensive of strength, calisthenic, or HIIT sessions. Solving that is partially solving my ongoing time problem, a problem I know how to solve if only I could commit. Another part of that is just motivation, also in progress. So you know. That’s that.
The rest is about my current learning situation, and this is going to be another “thinking things through” type of post. In this one, I’m not walking away with any real solutions, just trying to gather my thoughts into a type of ball that I can ponder over. So a real blog-ass blog. I’ll try and do something like a real solution another time.
It’s particularly on my mind right now because some of the available possibilities have deadlines for starting them. You know, enrolling in college. Colleges tend to organize their classes by time into semesters (or trimesters, which I recently found some do). The big standard starting semester is for Fall, which usually starts at the start of September or end of August. And it’s August now. I kinda really just want to get started on that now, and I’m really wanting to just sign up… but every part of me that resists impulse is telling me I should wait. And now we get to today’s real subject, let’s see if we can find a crux.
I have never taken college level formal classes of any kind, and I think it would do me some good to take some traditional, in person, real college classes Also, while I know not all community colleges are great, my county has one that’s considered very good by any number of measures. I’d be stupid to not at least give that a go at some point. I also really like the option. I know a lot of people that speak extremely highly of this school and the experiences they had there. However, time and money are huge parts of my planning equation, and even this highly rated low cost community college isn’t a perfect, single-option solution.
Look, I’ve come to the conclusion that this just is going to cost me a shitload of money and take a shitload of time. I’m going to have to take out a loan or perhaps a series of loans in order to do this. It’s going to take me years to complete, even if I manage to greatly accelerate things. But this is not the end of things, it is a phase on the way to something else. I need to keep that in perspective, because however long this phase takes and however much it costs, I need to come out of it with something, and I need that something to count towards whatever the next phase is.
There are options out there to do cheap and there are options to do quick. Some of those options are both quick and cheap. Some of those do include real, actual degrees from serious colleges with accreditation. However, there is then the question of the Quality of Credits. This is important to me because, however unlikely, it’s possible that cheaper, quicker credits appearing on a transcript may complicate future prospects.
From my research so far, it seems true that most employers never check transcripts, don’t care about grades, college is done and dusted to them. But some do. It very much depends on the kind of job you’re after, and I might come out of this experience wanting a career where that matters. Additionally, continuing in higher education looks like it often requires a review of transcripts. What if I want to enter a Masters program or something even higher than that, and what if an option pops up to go to a school I’m very interested in, but they care about the details of my credits. Well if like 50 of my undergrad credits come from CLEP, Sophia, or whatever, does that hurt me? If they’re pass/fail type grades, will they just tell me to pound sand? And I’m not sure if you can fix that, or what fixing that would look like if you can. Retake the classes? I guess that would be fine, but if the credit I got in the first place was of a low enough perceived quality that the school makes me retake it, then does it then stand to reason that the actual quality of the credit isn’t just perceived as low but actually is low? If there wasn’t a transcript check and no one to challenge me, when do I figure that out, first day on the job? Is that then just wasted time? Or does it matter? If I just want to play the labor market game, then it doesn’t matter if I know things. Who gives a shit, modern employers are clearly lying in their hiring, so why shouldn’t I cheat at selling my labor?
Something that’s helped me in the past is to try and actually look at my bigger problems I’m working to solve for, goals in this case, and work out a, for lack of a better framework, sort of strategy that can get me further toward that end. Right? What I need is a plan. But I’m having trouble not just making the plan, but even getting a start on it.
Part of what’s making this goal hard to plan for is that I’m not entirely sure what that end goal… is. Most of my current end-goal outlook is pretty squishy. It’s like, I’d want to have the skills to do my own thing and also to have something recognizable as valuable to potential employers in a jobs market. So basically, what I want is both the skills and the proof of having those skills (which is why college seems like a good idea). I especially want both and not just one because what I think my best future looks like is one where I do both – I do my own shit, make my own whatever, but also find paths to working with others in enjoyable ways, and that the two together also pay the bills. Unless I can manage to pay the bills some other way, in which case, I don’t give a shit if I make any money off of my tinkering or collaborations. I like my solo tinkering and I like my collaborative work, and those need to be in my future plans. Paying the bills also needs to be in those plans, but as problems, they do not need to be solved by the same equation, so to speak.
Maybe worth mentioning is that if all I wanted was the piece of paper, then fuck it, let’s find a degree mill! Or split the difference, do college hacking and hack it real hard, where I prove that I get enough of enough things, don’t care about quality of credits, and just get the labor market advantage of a degree to try and land another job. But that’s the only thing I’m certain I don’t want. I don’t want to just land another “good job”.
I can’t survive another good-on-paper job that slowly eats away at my soul. It’s so frustrating, because so much of the last job I had was good. There were only a handful of things bad with it, but even so, that handful of bad was too much. At least some of the bad was me, but me by position, so if I were to get hired at a similar place but with a better position, am I not then just shifting my suffering onto someone else, someone even less deserving of the suffering? I’m off topic again.
Alright, I’m spiraling again. I want to end on some of the better thoughts. The first is that I at least know I want in on the sciences and that, even if I don’t pursue a career in Computer Science, Programming, Data Blah, or whatever, I absolutely need to bolster my tech related skills. I’m not terribly lacking in those skills, compared to the general population, but I’m not good enough in any of them to really get shit done. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this or not, but so far I’ve been mostly focused on things that I either know are needed for every degree (English Comp. or equivalent), things that will very likely be relevant to whichever degree I pick (Statistics), or things I know will help me, even if they don’t directly translate. For that last category, I’m still very happy that I’m working through that CS50x course, and that I took watched those Econ lectures. I’m certain I’ll pick up some Python, probably some PHP, and if I can find something else that fits nicely with the little bits of programing and app dev I’ve already done, I’ll add that, too. Where would a college cover something like SQL? I’m dangerous with sql, and I’d like to be actually good at it. Hmm… I’ll keep an eye out.
So I guess I have some starting parts of a plan, which I suppose is something. Anyway, part of how I’ve been able to keep the wheels on this thus far has been planning, including weekly breakdowns, and I haven’t gotten to this week’s yet. So I’m going to wrap things up here now so I can do that before it gets much later on this Monday evening. Maybe I’ll finally get to bed on time and start working on that whole time and motivation problem. Maybe.