Ardentli.Net

I’m at yet another point in my life that could be dubbed a “crossroad” or a point where my life will take a sharp turn in one direction or another. The end of summer is fast approaching and I will be returning back to college to finish my last two quarters of classes (my university does a quarter system – not a semester system).  As of September, I will have exactly 6 months left of classes and I will graduate with my BS in Information Technology at the end of February 2010.

I kind of dub that point as event horizon. It’s the point where all things including light my life as I now know it will get sucked into a minuscule little point the adult world. After that point I have no idea what I’ll be doing. I don’t really have any concrete plans at all. True I have a lot of ideas of what I’ll be doing, but none of them are set in stone and that kind of bugs me. Below are the current possibilities:

• Decide that, for now, IT is a terminal degree and get a full-time job in Rochester as a software developer. I could potentially be happy with this or I could be miserable since I can’t imagine myself in a cubicle for the next 30+ years.
• Work for 6 months full-time to get some more work experience and then enter the IT-MS program. It’d basically be free due to scholarships, but I can’t help but think this moronic since I’m not sure I want to be an IT professional forever as mentioned above.
• Work for 6 months and do volunteer work at hospitals/pet adoptions so I can send in my application for Physician Assistant school starting next fall. It’s very competitive and there’s no guarantee I’d get accepted anyway. The career change would be intense, the graduate school expensive, and who knows if I’d actually like health care more than programming anyway.
• Go the more professional route and apply for the 1 year MBA program. I do think it’d enhance my degree and give me a more cut-throat edge in the IT business world, but once again, meh.

Either way I know I want to stay local. My boyfriend still has 3 more years of college to finish his BS/MS+co-ops and I don’t think I’d be very happy with a long-distance relationship especially if I considered moving back to the DC metro area (which I’m not planning on since I really hate that place. Too freaking sweaty, boring architecture, rude people). If I decide on stopping my education in 6 months I’ll probably end up with a house and a dog within a year, which is a nice thought, but who knows if I’d be happy with that either.

Bleh, I envy my peers who know exactly what they want to do after graduation.

I’m quickly approaching the end of my undergraduate days. I have, as of this very moment, 6 more classes I need to take to fulfill my undergraduate requirements and get my BS in Information Technology. This means I have two quarters left, no matter how you look at it, since the most classes I can take per quarter is 5. I’m thinking of just going for two slightly easier quarters and dividing them equally with 3 classes fall quarter and 3 for winter.

I’ve been contemplating my eminent future with a great deal of difficulty. What do I want to do after college? Jump straight into the working world? Pursue a graduate degree in Information Technology or a MS in Business? Stay in Rochester or go elsewhere?

I sat down with a notebook and scribbled down anything and everything career related that could possibly make me happy. A horrible realization overcame me when I realized that I don’t really want to work in the web and software development industry! Well, at least, not for the next 30 years. I like learning about it and I’ve enjoyed my past four years in college learning about computing, but it’s just not something that drives me or excites me the way it used to which is a real shame.  I can see myself working in the field for a few years, but I’m just not excited about the future of my career in this field.

I’ve been thinking about what else I can do career wise that would make me excited to get up in the morning and go to work. I’ve always liked health care and honestly I think it might be a better fit for me. Anything to stave off a life in a cubicle. I feel stupid for not realizing this earlier and doing something about it earlier in my academic career, but here I stand deciding to apply to graduate school for something wholly different than what I studied as an undergrad.

*takes a deep breath*

I am in the process of speaking with the Physician Assistant program at my current college. This fall they are starting their brand new BS/MS program (previously there was only a BS program) and they said I’d be a good, competitive applicant. This means another two years academically and a third year of clinical rotations.

Why PA? Well, I was strongly considering applying to MD school a year or two after graduation. Working full time, studying for MCATs, volunteering at a hospital, and then applying in a year or two. I then realized I wasn’t sure I was willing to make the 7+ year commitment to that study path and next considered nursing. I didn’t think I’d be entirely happy with that job wanting more surgical experience/autonomy in my field, so I settled on Physician Assistant which is a happy medium.

I could see myself happy and active in this field for many years.

Needless to say, the program’s competitive and the work, difficult. I’m working now to get a volunteer experience at a hospital near my college as well as some shadowing experience. I’ll also be catching up on some more medical courses over the next year before fall to get more background and better prepare myself to enter the program.

The path ahead is a long one, but I’m honestly relieved that I’m going for something that will honestly make me happy and not just something that would be lucrative. IT is a great degree to have and I know I could easily have a $55k+ starting salary, but it’s not what I want to do. Even though this will cost a lot of money (getting degrees ain’t cheap!), I think it’ll be worth it!

Wish me luck getting in this fall! ^_^

I’ve finally got around to making a custom layout. It’s nothing spectacular, but at least it’s no longer a pre-made template (if you’re seeing anything funky it’s probably because I’m not done editing the layout yet!).

Spring quarter is finally coming to a close. I have another week of classes and then a week of finals before I can finally put this quarter behind me. It’s been a flurry of exams and projects so I’ve had to put a lot of my online endeavors on the back burner. Hopefully I’ll have a little more time to get some of my projects done.

I’m having a great time perusing the tutorials over at Smashing Magazine. I love all their issues on typography. I seriously wish the web supported more than the basic font families. I’m hoping in the next few years browsers will evolve such that you can use any font and it’ll be imported into the user’s browser so that we can have all kinds of beautiful web interfaces. I’m also in the process of expanding my web development skills a bit and learning AJAX. I’m assured there’s not much to it (and it doesn’t appear there really is). It’s so refreshing just to be able to sit and learn things at my leisure versus them being projects in class.

P.S. In regard to Bare Minerals from my previous entry, I returned my starter kit. I didn’t like how the makeup made my face look super shiny and it just wasn’t giving me the right amount of coverage. I’m a bit on the disappointed side. I heard so many great reviews. Oh well, on to the next best, new thing I suppose.

I’m almost done with my fourth year of my university experience and so I thought I’d make a compilation of a few things I’ve learned while here:

• No matter how old we are there seems to be an oddly high percentage of seniors who still can’t do their own laundry
• You start your freshman year skipping a ton of classes because you can. By your senior year your attendance is exemplary not because someone’s forcing you to go, but because you want to get your money’s worth.
• Females in computing majors are still extremely rare and overly worshiped because of their gender.
• Liberal arts requirements honestly seem like a waste of time to me. I’m pretty sure they’re there under the preface of having “well-rounded” students, but honestly it just seems like a way to get another year’s worth of tuition out of you.
• Graduating with (insert x degree here) doesn’t mean you’re really good enough to get a job in that field and be successful.
• Too many people still expect things to be handed to them — like interviews. It’s your job to find yourself a job. Not your counselors, parents, professors, etc.
• After four years I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do after graduation.
• I’m going to miss being a student when I’m done with college.
• It’s easy to see who’s going to be successful after college versus who will end up living in their parent’s basement for the next ten years.
• Not everyone in college should honestly be there.
• No major is going to teach you to be awesome at your future profession. You have to have self-motivation and strive for excellence to succeed.
• Some majors are a great deal harder than others. It’s funny seeing people in said easy degrees trying to argue their degrees are every bit as hard as some of the more intensive ones.
• College food is not as bad as you make it out to be.
• I still am under the firm assertion that living in dorms does two things: 1) forces socially inept people to actually interact with other human beings and 2) make you absolutely abhor the idea of living with random people you don’t know who puke in the toilets every week.
• College parties at someone’s apartment really aren’t that fun.
• College is pretty much the time to try anything new you’ve ever wanted to try. It’s also, strangely enough, the time of your life where you’ll have the least money so it becomes damn near impossible to try half the things you want to.
• College is a great place. You’ll meet people who you are so humbled by from their sheer intelligence and others that make you wonder how the hell they got there in the first place.
• Building 70 (the computing building) has a 10:1 ratio of males to females — and I’m being optimistic
• Also, Building 70 has a running record for the most people that don’t shower on a semi-frequent basis.