My First Taste of College (At 19)
Over my lifetime, I have taken many college courses. I took my first college course when I was 19. I had just finished my GED, and a few months later I was signing up for college courses.
My first “major” was travel and tourism. (I’ll date myself here.) We had these huge catalogs that listed every airline’s flight plans from all the different airports. I can’t recall if these were only domestic flights or international flights too. I enjoyed looking up that stuff, and I wanted to actually work on a cruise ship as an activities director or be a travel agent.
Cruise Ships, Catalogs, and Crowds
Nowadays, I’m unsure if going on a cruise ship is really worth it. Seeing people stuck on the ships during COVID made me think it’s not such a good idea anymore. I am not a fan of crowds like that. (I love a good concert but generally try to get aisle seats.)
Florida, Accounting, and a High-Risk Pregnancy
So let’s take a walk through my education, it truly has been lifelong. I moved away from where I started taking college courses and wasn’t able to get back to it for a few years. I lived in Florida for maybe 18 months and took a couple classes, but it was sales and some other course I don’t recall.
Then I took an accounting course, actually, I had to drop it twice for different reasons:
- The first time was a bad instructor.
- The second time, the instructor was great, but I had a high-risk pregnancy and had to drop the class because work was more important.
I did take a bunch of classes around this time including ethics and psychology. I really liked those classes. The teacher taught them in a way that really required serious critical thinking skills. (Many topics we discussed are now quite political, so I’ll skip that part.)
Life Gets in the Way (Again)
Then I had my child and was working until she started regular school. This was when I had to quit my corporate job that I loved due to time constraints (daycare hours, school hours, work hours).
So I went back to school again and took quite a few classes. I was getting a dual degree (computer science and mathematics) and doing a good job at it.
The Dual Degree That Almost Happened (Trigonometry Love Story)
I loved trigonometry, though it seems most schools don’t teach it now. My teacher taught us without the expensive TI calculator so we really understood it. He taught with circles vs. triangles, which honestly isn’t too big a difference once you understand.
In another math class, we were taught how to prove theorems. That was intriguing, and I enjoyed doing it.
Side note: I had a neighbor’s daughter who was being homeschooled, and they hired me to teach her geometry. I tried to teach her how to do proofs, but she was a lousy student and would run off if I had to leave the room for any reason.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it.
Then I got pregnant with child number two, and you guessed it, another high-risk pregnancy. (My body didn’t like being pregnant.)
Gathering Credits Across States
This time, we moved right after that one was born. Over the years I stayed home, I took a few accounting classes and finished them. (My teacher thought it should be my major but I did it for other reasons.)
When my youngest reached high school age, I decided to go back to work. So I decided to gather all my credits and work towards my actual degrees.
At this point, I was majoring in sciences at a junior college. This way, all my credits from across the states could be put to use toward my associate degree. Then I went to work on my four-year degree after I received my two-year degree.
Courses I was taking all at once (yes, really):
- Lab Biology
- General Chemistry
- Calculus courses
I had taken organic chemistry years before and really enjoyed it, but that was one of the classes I had to drop due to a high-risk pregnancy.
(That is a heavy load to take all at once.)
My family wasn’t thrilled with the long study days, so I changed my degree to business management and marketing.
Full Circle: Back to Finance
Then I took a finance class, and this triggered my memory of my very first college class. That was the first time someone explained to me about starting to invest when you’re young so you can retire with a nice nest egg. I had never known that concept before, and it was life-changing in a good way.
I have always had some sort of investment working for me since my early-mid 20s.
So I ended up going back to where my very first class took me, finance. My BBA and MSF are both in finance.
Proof That a Dropout Can Do Anything
I can research the heck out of any company, because that was basically my MSF requirement: a two-to-four-page document every week on some new topic, depending on the course.
Although I never had the opportunity to use my degrees, I do not regret getting them. Like anything else, they are proof that a high school dropout can achieve a lot when they set their sights on finishing.
What about you?
Did you get additional schooling later in life?
What did you learn, or what would you like to learn?
(You are never too late to learn something new.)
