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Friday, January 07, 2011

Back to School in 2011

This week was my first week of college classes since 2007, and I can see it'll take a little getting used to. Not necessarily to the classes themselves, but to the homework and managing my time at home. I'm taking undergraduate level classes again to get the prerequisites necessary for the masters I want to pursue.
My first time around, my classes were all related to language, but now I've got to level up to health science! That means "Hello, physics, biology, and statistics!" I never was too fond of math..
This quarter my first classes are Statistics for Health Science and Astronomy: The Solar System. Yesterday it became apparent that for Stats we make our own homework. We have to find practice problems on the internet or in a book that wasn't ordered for our class (and therefore none of the 10 students has a copy - though we do have a general stats book) and keep them in a notebook that we can keep in a notebook to turn in at the end of the 10-week course for credit. A copy of the book we don't have is in the Learning Center, but you can't even take copies of the pages; you have to use it in the Learning Center. I think I'll look into finding a copy at the library of the campus next to where I work.
Astronomy is set up in a more familiar way. We have 10 weeks of class, only meeting once a week and that means doing a lot of work on our own - but at least it's "read the chapter and answer these questions, then email them to me by Sunday". We have our first assignment due this Sunday and our first quiz is on Tuesday!

As far as the rest of this leveling business goes, the soonest I'll be finished with the undergraduate classes is the summer of 2012. That is, if I am accepted into grad school by that time AND I can take 3 courses packed into a compact 10-week summer course. If it doesn't work out that way, I'd have to take those 3 courses over fall, winter and spring quarters and I wouldn't finish the undergrad classes until 2013. We'll just have to see!

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