Why I Decided to go Back to School

It was 1989, and I was graduating from High School. My dreams of joining the Air Force dashed due to surgery which deprived my left leg of a full fibula. My primary focus becoming a degree in the IT field due to a Christmas gift of a Commodore 64 several years prior. For various reasons, I left school after only one month.

For the next 20 years I worked in one way or another in the computer industry, with a primary focus now being developing web sites using PHP and other scripting languages. In the beginning, it was fun. I was on the cutting edge, developing code that didn't exist anywhere else. The Dot Com era was in full bloom and I was a part  of it, and loving it.

In the early years of the 21st Century, long after the end of the Dot Com era and the introduction of free content management systems, web site development became a lost art, at least for me. Finding work was becoming difficult as more and more people turned to developing and managing their own web sites using tools like Microsoft FrontPage, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

Between 2007 and 2009 I moved my family from La Crosse, Wisconsin to the Minneapolis area, then to Chicago, then Kansas City, then back home. Chasing a dream that I did not know was dead for me. I know that now, and in April 2009 while in Kansas City a phone call from a recruiter at the University of Phoenix started me on a brand new journey.

For at least two years before starting, I had been looking into going back to school to obtain a degree in either Elementary Education or the Culinary Arts. I did not dedicate nearly enough time to researching how I could both afford to go back, and how school could fit into my busy family life.

A major turning point in my life. Shortly after lunch, the phone rings. It's Dimetri Armstead, a recruiter for the University of Phoenix. He had been forwarded a request from one of those "go to school in your pajamas" commercials that I had responded to nearly six months prior. For the first time, I found someone who appeared to truly care about my future. We talked for nearly an hour, and by the end of that conversation, I was not only interested, I was enrolled. I started school two weeks later, on Monday, April 20th, 2009.

When I began the journey, the plan was to complete my degree in under 20 months. Lofty goals for a 38 year old man with a family. My first four classes went smooth, with three A's and a B-. In fact, the first year went great, with nothing lower than that B-.

The summer of 2010 proved to be very tough, and a difficult move, loss of my last regularly paying employment, and a depression caused lower grades, and by the beginning of 2011 I had failed my first class. I knew something was wrong, and took two weeks off to heal and get back on track. I did so with flying colors, retaking the failed class and passing it with a B+.

It has been two years, to the day, since starting school. For the most part I have done well and earned acceptable grades. No, I am not a straight A student, and I even failed one class causing me to repeat it, and pay for it.

This past Monday I started my final block of classes. On June 5th, 2011, I will earn (or at least be eligible for) an Associate of Elementary Education degree. One step closer to teaching; one step closer to my dream; one step closer...