Lately, I’ve been thinking about switching to another college to continue on my degree. Sinclair is fine and all but it’s just not going to do it for me. I am realizing that I will not be able to complete this degree using distance learning methods in its entirety by going to Sinclair. I have been looking at my options and it’s looking like transferring may be the best choice. I could get a web development certificate but honestly, I need the degree even if it’s just an Associate’s. I don’t think I can get too much further with that paper.

The biggest pain in my arse that is holding me up is the “Intro to Computer Programming” course that is the prerequisite for all of the programming courses. They’re not offering it online yet so; nevertheless, I’ve been waiting for it to become so. I don’t think it’s going to happen soon and I am running out of classes to take to fill in my credit hours. I won’t even really mind taking the class even though I know there won’t really be any new material for myself since I’m already programming in various languages, but I just need a way to actually get it out of the way.

Recently, I have found OhioLearns.org where I can search for degrees from colleges in Ohio from any category, type, and even how much of the degree is online. In my search of Associate’s degrees in IT/Computers and 100% at a distance, I got 6 matches. After looking through them, the best choice I think I have from that list is an Associate’s in Programming and Software Development through the University of Toledo. It’s only 72 credit hours and the curriculum doesn’t look too bad. I’ve submitted for some additional information and asked fairly specific questions regarding my situation and how to best proceed. I’ve also updated my FAFSA to send my financial aid information to UT so I can see how much I can afford to spend out of pocket there. Toledo seems to go with semesters rather than quarters so I think I still have time to get this sorted out before Spring semester.

As of today, I am 53 out of 101 credit hours into my degree at Sinclair – a little over halfway there. Hopefully a lot of that can transfer over since they are mostly general education courses.  Some are technical/development oriented so I hope I don’t need to take those again as well. Right now I want to see what this option fully looks like instead of dwelling on it. I’ve skipped out on Summer and Fall quarters from Sinclair just because of time and money. I really need to get back into the game and just get this degree done though.

I’m also going to look into certifications again. Before getting my full time job here I was beginning the site designer’s track with CIW. I do have a CIW Professional certification in site design but there’s probably more out there.

Got to figure out what to do…

This entry was posted by Adam on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 11:37 am and is filed under Life, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.