I must be nuts. At the ripe middle age of 56, I'm doing yet another thing I never expected to do- I've signed up to go back to college. And not to finish a degree, either. Starting from scratch. And not a walk-in-the-park course either. It's probably going to be harder than crap. And being a college student, I realize that "harder than crap" is a comparative adjective phrase that doesn't hold up at all, but you get the idea.
As negative as all that must have sounded, though, I'm actually quite excited about it. There are so many unexpected connections in all this. My degree is going to be in Information Technology (with an emphasis in Security), a field that scarcely existed when I originally reached college age. It's an online degree, meaning that it's about computers, and it's being done by means of a computer. That definitely didn't exist when I was 18.
The progress technology had to make in order for this to be possible is nothing short of amazing. I'm not sure we would have been able to visualize being able to do this back then. We had been told what the future would be like, but those predictions usually involved flying cars and the like. I'm still waiting for that one, but overall, the progress has been astonishing. The computer I'm typing this on is a decent one, but nothing extraordinary compared to some. That makes it easy to forget that, average as it is, this computer is more powerful than the ones on the Apollo missions that took men to the moon.
We've come a very long way, and our possibilities now are almost endless. It's just my opinion, but I believe that the days of living an adulthood without a learning curve are behind us. I believe we have to either go forward or backward, and staying in one place is a luxury we no longer have. And, as my daughters might say, I'm down with that. The only catch is that you have to actively pick up the baton and run with it, and once you've done that, it's your race to win or lose.
A lot has certainly changed since I originally enrolled at good ol' Tennessee Tech. It's more important than ever to have a plan for success, and I'm finding that age and experience are a big help in that area. In fact, I've used my TTU days as the basis for my first item in my own plan:
I plan to drink a LOT less beer this time.
