Picking college courses

Good news and bad news this post. First the bad news. I had the privelage of being asked by one of my former climb leaders to join them for a summit attempt of Mt. Shasta. The team was able to summit but I was not. I got altitude sickness at high camp and was not able to join them for the summit push. The lessons learned will be the subject of next month’s post.

Now the good news; I was accepted to and start my postgraduate education in the Fall! On September 18th Oregon State University’s Online Master’s in Computer Science program will begin its fall quarter. My current employer, Dexcom, also approved my tuition assistance request for $5,250 this year, so my education will be that much cheaper to undertake! The OSU MSCS program will ultimately require me to complete 45 credit hours, of which I will be taking 8 credit hours in my first quarter. That’s a heavier course load than I had originally planned on, but my academic advisor feels confident that I should be able to manage. It will be a little odd going back to school after a 13 year hiatus. Hopefully once I start working through the coursework it will become second nature once again.

I signed up for two core courses, Programming Languages and Algorithms. I wasn’t particularly good in either during my undergraduate work, so my plan is to throw myself into the deep end and get the hard stuff out of the way first. After that’s done I can take the courses that I found more enjoyable like computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and robotics at my leisure. Overall, I’m really excited to begin my masters.

What about you? If you’re undergoing a continuing education course let us know in the comments!

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash