After being laid off from an IT job at a medium size company (they got in trouble with the IRS and they shut them down selling off their assets), I tried to find another job, but the country and especially Georgia was experiencing an economic slump.
I honestly tried to find a job for a few months, collected unemployment (the max which was something like close to $300 or so), sent out resumes, called companies, tried to network, all to no avail.
As I got discouraged (I guess my age had something to do with not getting hired), I contemplated going into business on my own, lost a bunch of money trying various Internet Get Rich schemes, until I found out that schemes they are. You can't make money with those programs, unless perhaps you start one up yourself and then try to recruit people. That will work for a while and then I guess you have to move on to a new program.
Anyway, I gave up on that and decided that I would refresh my IT knowledge and enroll for another degree and choose Devry University to do so. I enrolled myself in the CIS (Computer Information Systems) curriculum, and started taking classes in Nov of 2002.
The degree requires 147 credit hours for a Bachelor's and another 15 eight week courses to get the Master's.
All started off well. In fact, I scored A's in all classes I was enrolled in for 3 semesters in a row. T'was nice. 4.0 GPA for quite some time. I could not feel better especially since I was taking a mixture of programming (lots of work), and general education classes (lots of memorizing).
I was and still am a full time student, taking Accelerated courses only (8 weeks, once a week, 5 to 6 hours per course). Tons of work as most courses require the use of two textbooks and, of course, a lot of self-study is required as the Faculty cannot cover all of the material in such a short time.
I was happy, and decided that maybe I could do some work at the University. I investigated this a little and the job that appealed to me was Faculty Assistant come Grader. Salary: forget it 6.75 per hour. So if you are in my situation don't do it if you need the money. Fortunately I did not really.
More in my next blog. Gotta study some for a course tonight Friday July 16.