Hi Brandon, Just thought I'd give you my 2 cents from the position you may find yourself in the 6 months.
I gave up a reasonably promising career in electronics to go "back to school" to study Real-time systems (v.low level programming) at age 31. And although I think all of the advice you have received has been top notch, there are a few things you may want to seriously think about before starting, and this will apply to doing a part-time/night course as well. 1) Your wife (I take it you have one from your original post). You must be sure she is behind you 100% in this. Two other mature students on my course have had some major problems in their relationships through going back. The understanding starts to wear off when you've spent four nights on the trot programming till 2 in the morning, or doing the final touch-ups on a piece of course work. Too many times have I heard the comment, "Well I won't be getting any for a while!!", after a busy night of coding from one or both of them. 2) Your bills. No matter what anyone has said about money, you must remember that if you do go back you will have a lot less no-mater what financial help you get. This may not matter too much if you stay in a company and do the course part-time, but if you do rely on the over-time you can forget that, you wont have the time to do it with the course work. 3) (Part-time/night course) Social life!! You wont have one! I did my electronics qualifications part-time when I worked for HP. You can forget any social activities you do if you expect to get good grades doing it this way. Uni is easier, and you can make a bit of time for the social (read beer drinking) activities, but not much. The lecturers expect better from a mature student, and you will find (like I do) you spend a little more time on your work than the 18-21 year olds. Having said all of that, if you never did the college/university thing when you were younger like me, this is the best time to do it. I took an 85% drop in income to do the degree and have not regretted one second of it. Unfortunately people *do* check for degrees first when employing, no matter the field. It is a shame this happens as I have known people who could run rings around the whole engineering departments who never had a look in for some of the jobs. It may only be a piece of paper, but it's the one that gets you the interview!! And employers can't see you shine, if you ain't sat in front of them. Well, good luck no matter what you choose to do. Just make sure your better half is in the decision making from the start ;-) Cheers Simon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brandon Goodin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2003 8:52 AM Subject: [OT] Re: Does a degree matter? > Wow, this has been some incredible insight. I can't thank you enough for > your advice. It has been extremly helpful in helping me to focus my > direction. As always you guys/girls have shown true heart in assisting a > fellow geek. Thanks again! > > Brandon Goodin > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
