Commencement

So, I sent this e-mail to my coworkers today, and I'd like to share it here:

Hi all,

Last Friday I participated in my commencement down in Southern California to officially receive my Bachelor’s degree.

It was a long and interesting road – originally I had moved up here for college at Sonoma State University in the far North Bay, and soon after that it hit home that a History major had nothing to do with my true passion – being a professional computer nerd. The college only offered programming classes and I never felt a calling to actually do programming. Really – how was it possible to get a degree in something as fast-paced and changing as the type of IT I was interested in?

So, I ended up dropping out of college to get hired full-time by the college working in their IT department. I took classes for free and continued my general credit requirements, but that slowly tapered off and I dedicated myself to my career.

It always bugged me that I never finished my degree. It was one of those things I knew I had to do, but never thought I would actually do. One night a few years later I filled out an online survey about college education and was matched up with “DeVry University.” I thought the place was a joke and it just existed to take money and pass all its students as long as they paid the ridiculous tuition. I was definitely wrong about that.

One of the admissions advisors, Tiffany Garcia, called me a few days later. She spoke to me for hours, addressing what happened in my quest, what I wanted to do, how I felt about my degree, etc. She told me about the Technical Management program they had – which was a mix of Business and Information Systems, and she told me I could do it completely online or go to one of their many campuses around the Bay Area. She also told me it was a fully accredited university and that it was a true Bachelor’s degree, much to my doubt. I let that sit for about a year and she called me once a month, and eventually asked me to come down to her office in San Francisco and enroll. I thought about it and then went ahead and did it, enrolling for my first class in January of 2007. All 30 of the credits I had from my time at SSU transferred.

Since January of 2007 I have been taking two classes every 8 weeks online full time with no breaks, and as of two weeks ago, finally completed my 125^th credit for graduation for a Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Management with a Project Management concentration. The education was top notch – the professors were 90% of the time still employed in their respective fields (project managers, business analysts, information security analysts) and taught their courses. They were always available by phone and e-mail and were very dedicated to their jobs.

To this day my family doesn’t quite understand what sort of degree it is because it isn’t from a traditional state school or in one of the more normal sciences or arts, and I think that is going to be one of the challenges for any of us in these types of IT careers. It was never something you could go to school to really learn up until now – and the type of school you do learn it from is so radically different than tradition that oftentimes the quality of the education can get overshadowed by the perceived lack of establishment.

I promised Tiffany I would try to do good where I could in return for how much she twisted my arm, so if any of you ever encounter a DeVry graduate on a job interview, please know that it was truly a challenging yet rewarding curriculum and the things they learned apply to everyday life in the corporate IT world that oftentimes people have to discover on their own, outside of the nurturing environment of a classroom.

Mike