New tricks.

I don't feel like an old dog. But I am.
by AC - permalink

So obviously the blog has been left to stagnate this month. I've been busy navigating the almost incomprehensible administrative mess that Southwest calls its admissions and registration departments. After hours and hours of being shuttled from one office to another, three dozen unheeded voicemails, and two weeks of limbo after my University of Memphis transcript was lost -- twice -- I somehow managed to get fully admitted and registered, and I've just finished my first week of college in almost nine and a half years.

I'm taking an intro computer course focused on MS Office 2007 (which explains why the book costs $136), a basic (not BASIC) programming course, a web programming course, and a gen-ed cultural geography course. I had planned on taking at least one more, but surprisingly, my U of M record covers 14 hours I can apply to my IT Web Tech major. This semester shouldn't be too difficult, the fun will start later on, when I get into client- and server-side apps, advanced Java, XML, SQL, etc. Since I have virtually nothing else to do, I'm determined to ace every course I take over these four+ semesters, but after a decade, it's going to be hard to retrain my brain for this kind of focus and constant work.

I did get a surprisingly encouraging sign from the deeper recesses of my head when I had to take the math portions of the COMPASS test at the last minute to qualify for the web programming course. I haven't done any sort of higher math since high school, but I managed to get through it with almost perfect scores with no preparation at all. I have no idea how that happened.

The most surreal thing about this whole experience has been wandering around the campuses and realizing that I'm older than a good 95% of the students there. I feel like a high school senior in a school that goes right down to sixth grade. The thing is, I don't look much older than any of them, and in fact I look younger than a lot of them. But I realize much better how different this is from high school, and even in the first week I've noticed that I'm spending a lot more time talking to my professors after class than, say, standing around in the hall talking to my cell phone. If we were all dropped into the Thunderdome, these kids would swagger right up to Master Blaster, absolutely certain that they can kick his ass because, hey, how hard can it be? Meanwhile, I'd be on the outside calculating exactly how quickly I can get at that chainsaw over in the corner, and trying to figure out a way to smuggle in a shotgun, just in case.