BYU, Here I come

I just finished writing my last paper for my last class at University of Phoenix. My class was a Critical Thinking class. I'm going into Information Technology but a lot of the focus of my degree has been on Philosophy, Ethics, and Critical Thinking. The Critical Thinking has been particularly helpful at my job lately. I've had to make some crucial decisions that effect the direction my team is heading. I really don't want to blog about my job because frankly, I don't like talking about my flair.

I've put a lot of thought into my decision to go to BYU. It's been a dream of mine since I was about 8 or 9 years old. I mainly wanted to go there and play football - I don't think too many near 40 year old over 300 pounders play football at the NCAA level, plus I haven't played since I was 12. About 13 years ago I started college at Utah Valley State College with the desire to transfer to BYU. It seemed like things kept getting harder and harder to get into BYU, so I finally just gave up and went to the U of U. It was hard to get the classes I needed at the U of U so I went to Salt Lake Community College. Then I moved to California and tried to get into U.C. Irvine. Then I moved back to Utah and decided to go the non-traditional route by getting my Associates at Mountain West College and my Bachelors at University of Phoenix.

As far at BYU's graduate program, they require a 3.0 GPA or higher, I have a 3.96, and an ecclesiastical endorsement from my Bishop. My biggest fear is that I wont be able to do as much of the course work online like I did at Phoenix. The bright side is that I'll get a really good discount of football tickets. :)

I kept feeling like I was getting robbed by University of Phoenix because I was only getting a rudimentary overview of the things I wanted to learn. For example, I really want to be a Java programmer. I took a Java 1 and Java 2 (they don't call it that, but I can't remember the course numbers) at University of Phoenix. We really got into creating classes (objects) and GUI programming. This was stuff I wanted to learn. I found out that if I really want to learn Java, I have to get the books and teach myself the stuff I want to know. I want to know more about the JDBC and using Java for database programming. This is something that has eluded me so far. I know the books I need to buy, now I just need to buy them and force myself to learn new things with them. C# (C Sharp) is a language I learned at University of Phoenix. I'd never heard of it until then. It's very similar to Java and has some nice features for database and Web programming. C# is another thing I really want to immerse myself in.

Anyway, what I really learned from college is that college just gives you the skills and the discipline to succeed, but if you really want to succeed, you have to push yourself to learn the extra stuff on your own.