I just finished BS in Data Management and analysis. It took me a full 7 terms. I was not working outside the house during that time, and my at-home kids are (now) 22 and 15.
How did I spend a full 7 terms earning my degree?
Short version: I did it my way!
Lessons learned: Compare yourself to yourself, not to others.
It’s really hard to feel like you belong here when you see so many posts from people who completed all 12 CU of their first term in 2 weeks, or completed an entire degree in less than 2 terms, or all the other amazing feats of acceleration. Posts like this give you the false impression that MOST WGU students complete their coursework this quickly. But this is not the case.
My program mentor told me, in term 2, that she had only had 1 student who finished super quickly – I think they did all but 1 class in their first term. In my 6th term she admitted she finally had another one who was plowing through courses very quickly. So rapid acceleration is not the norm.
Many students who start WGU never even finish – if you finish, no matter how many terms it takes, you still finished!
While some people will say the purpose of WGU is to go fast, I disagree. The flexibility of WGU means it works for LOTS of different people in LOTS of different situations. If you can make WGU work for you, then this is where you belong.
What impacted my pace: Some of the biggest things I learned during these 7 terms were about myself. I’ve always joked about my bad memory and my ‘neurotic’ worrying, but I think if I were young today, these might be identified as learning disabilities. While my programming classes probably took me about twice as long to do as some people, the cert tests took 4-10x as long for me – because my memory is really that bad.
My anxiety got in the way too – I often rage-quit when a textbook explained the obvious part but didn’t explain the hard part, or had typos so bad I couldn’t understand what it was trying to say, or when a course asked you to do something that had not been taught. I learned decades ago that once I shut down, no amount of forcing myself to keep staring at a textbook will make me absorb the information. Once my anxiety has spiked, no learning happens. And a 10 minute break is not enough. When I was especially frustrated with a class, sometimes it could take several days before I was ready to try again.
I also have allergies that get in the way. When I went through allergy testing, I started reading an interesting article while I waited for the doctor. After the first round of scratch tests, I tried to go back to the article, but I couldn’t read it. I would read the same sentence over and over and have no idea what it said. When my seasonal or food allergies get really bad, I can’t focus.
I’m not the only one in my family with allergies either – I have to cook every meal from scratch. Take-out is not an option for us. Obviously, this interferes with study time too.
Part of it was the lack of structure. I had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 10 years when I started. But I knew that I do best with an externally imposed schedule. I prefer working in an office with set hours because I will get more work done that way. I’m not great at managing my own time. I can’t do ‘fake’ deadlines because I KNOW they are fake and I don’t take them seriously.
All of these factors got in the way every other time I tried to finish college. But this time at least I was determined to finish. I finally had the maturity and the commitment to see it through, and WGU’s flexibility allowed me to work with my limitations instead of fighting against them.
On the plus side, I rarely went 3 days without doing some school work. I found lots of on-line support, on Reddit, Slack and Facebook. I really loved my Student / Program mentor (her title changed while I was at WGU). And I think I just got stubborn about it: I was not going to stop until this was done!
My educational and work history:
I started at Penn State as an engineering major in 1983. I switched majors a few times, and finally left after about 5 completed terms.
2 years later I attended a highly competitive alternative college in FL, studying psychology. I had to write one 15-20 or two 8-12 page papers every week. I did not finish my undergraduate thesis in time, and despite trying to work with my advisor from a distance, I never got a chance to defend it in front of a committee before the time limit was up. So I had no degree.
I worked for a while at a startup ‘dot bomb’ – an early online retailer which grew quickly and was gone three years later. That company allowed me to move in to positions that took advantage of my skills. I ended up creating a bunch of access database and working in reporting.
I took a few programming courses at a local community college, and a database course at a for-profit school, but stopped pursuing further education when I got a great job as a data analyst. I ended up working on data warehouse projects and just loving it!
Family break: I first left work intending to just spend a year and a half at home with my youngest, until he started school. But my oldest had a bit of a crisis and I had to get creative to keep her in school. I stayed home driving her between 3 schools for a custom program. Then I ended up homeschooling my boys for 6 years! That included teaching calculus. . . and programming, of course!
When my youngest returned to public school for 7th grade, I went to WGU – suggested to me by a fellow homeschooling mom.
Term by term:
I transferred in 26 CU – several years already spent in college and only 26 CU. IT courses wont transfer in if they are over 5 or 10 years old. Ok, accept that and move on.
Term 1: I was so excited to start! My first 3 classes only took 3 weeks each: Intro to IT, English composition II, Critical Thinking and Logic (note, that class had 2 papers as well as a test when I took it!).
My progress screeched to a halt when I hit my first certification class. I had to pass the Comptia A+. I have never been at all interested in hardware and had never worked on hardware. This class was really hard for me. I spent 3 months on the two classes that make up the A+ cert (ok, that included the holidays, where I took time off to cook feasts!). I was really cranky because I hated the subject, I’m terrible at memorization, and this wasn’t what I went to school for!
18 CU’s completed term 1.
Term 2: after my frustration with the A+, my mentor treated me to an all-coding term!
Coding and scripting foundations was my fastest course, completed in 2 weeks. I thoroughly enjoyed it, esp the tiny bit of python. Coding and scripting applications was a good introduction to Java, which took slightly longer – about a month. While I hated web dev fundamentals, I created a website where I listed all the homeschool materials I want to sell, so that class took 6 weeks but made me about $300!
Next was data management foundations and applications – right up my alley, right? Nope – I often said if these classes had been my introduction to database, I’m not sure I would have gone it to it for a living. Very dry material and the project for the 2nd class was terrible. I spent the next 2 years on social media helping people pass that project. I spent about 7 weeks completing those two classes.
I asked for the Data Structures to be next since it was also a Java class and I didn’t want to forget too much from my last Java class. (My student/program mentor had thought it was a database class). This course was a lot slower for me. The material was very abstract, so I was reading slowly for comprehension. Then I was on prednisone and not able to sit down to work for 2 weeks. Still, I got the project accepted before the of the term with a whole day to spare! I also really felt proud of the work I did on that project.
21 CU’s completed term 2
Term break: Because my term ended 1 month before DMDA was open for transfer, I took a 1 month break between terms. I used this time to start studying networking using outside sources – Professor Messer! I switched from my original major of Software Development to the new, better fit of Data Management / Data Analysis. There was a lot of overlap and I did not lose any progress.
Term 3: Ok, having had all that ‘fun’ with coding, it was time to buckle down and do networking. This term had the in-house networking course, the Comptia Network+ and the Comptia Security+, and spreadsheets for a little mental break – spreadsheets was one of my 2 fastest classes.
It turns out I hated networking even more than I hated hardware. And there was SO much more to memorize! I barely passed my term, by the skin of my teeth, and I was seriously considering quitting WGU – spending 6 months studying networking seemed like a long and painful detour from my goal of earning a degree so I could go back to working on database! But I pressed on, hoping I would like what came next.
14 CU completed term 3
Term 4: It was time to start the nano-degree, the core of the DM/DA degree. I expected this to be smooth sailing – but I was mistaken! The nano-degree was aimed at a professional programmer who wanted to use their programming skills to be a data analyst. I was a data analyst who needed to learn these specific coding skills. The nano-degree was organized as projects, but translated in to WGU classes as 1-2 projects per class, not always related to each other.
The first class, intro to Data Science, had two projects. The first was a statistics project. While I had taken a college statistics class in the 80s, the 2nd half of this course was still challenging.
The next project was a data analysis project, using Python to analyze some data and create a web-based report using charts and graphs. My ramp up for python was slow, but the analysis part was easy enough. I analyzed data from the titanic for the difference between the ticket class and the age as well as survival rates.
Next class was Data Wrangling with Mongo. It turns out the Mongo portion was optional. The project for this class was to scrape map data off a specific website, clean it, dump it in to a database and do some queries on it to show that the data was now cleaner. This was the only class I had a slight advantage, as I was still pretty fluent in SQL and chose to do my project in MySQL.
Next was Data Analysis with R. I had taken a class in R previously, but was disappointed in this one. Instead of coding or manipulating data, this class was pretty much entirely about graphing with a specific R library. My project was rejected for using the wrong color palette and I was very frustrated!
The fourth class was Machine learning. This was actually my favorite class in the nano-degree. I felt it was the best organized and the most interesting. However, I did not finish my project in time – because I misread the requirements! I could have had the project handed in in time if I had not misunderstood the goal.
I only finished 9 credits term 4. Because I had made satisfactory progress in my previous terms and was self-paying, this did not cause any problems for me.
Term 5:
I completed the held-over course 10 days in to the term (after taking a week off for stress reduction).
The last course in the nano-degree was called Data visualization. It included two projects, both of which I found very frustrating. The first project was “A/B testing” which was a statistics course aimed at marketing analysts. The course work did not match much with the project and I needed a lot of help from the course mentors for that one. The final project was a Data Visualization project. This one required you to know Javascript, which I had never looked at before and hope to never look at again.
Next I completed the CIW Data Analytics cert – I found this easy, but frustrating because – again – it was aimed more at marketing analysts than data analysts.
Then technical Communication – two papers. I actually got my only excellence award on the first one.
At this point, I had completed my CU for the term – even though that included the class held over from the previous term. But it was time to try the first Oracle Cert test – the SQL test. Now, I had worked in Oracle SQL in the past and was fairly confident – but Oracle announced they were discontinuing this test! So I rushed to take it quickly, so I would have time to take it twice before my term ended.
Sure enough, I failed. I was disappointed but not surprised. I studied for another month, doing what the course instructor told me to do: I got to 100% completion in the Ucertify material and 90% score on the practice tests. I failed my second attempt at this test – with the exact same score as my first attempt!! Ugg.
13 Cu for term 5
Term 6: After failing the Oracle SQL cert test, I studied my rear off. I used 4 different non-school-supplied sources. By the end, I had spent 7 months on this course. Let me tell you, this was hard on the ego. I’ve WORKED in Oracle SQL. SQL is my jam! And I had not failed ANY OTHER tests my whole time at WGU. But I stuck with it and had a really good score in the end.
I studied the Project+ material in between studying the SQL – when I was too burnt out to look at SQL – and passed the Project+ less than 2 weeks after passing the Oracle test.
Next I wrote a bunch of papers, for Business of IT Applications and Capstone. I wrote my capstone about an actual project I had done last time I was working. Not too much trouble.
16 CU for term 6
Term 7: I had only 1 course for term 7. The final Oracle cert test, the Administration test. I have never done nor had any interest in database administration, or administration of any sort. This sort of test is even heavier on the memorization, and its material is completely unintuitive to me. Furthermore, the school textbook was probably ¾ useless. I spent the ENTIRE term on this course, finally taking the test about 2.5 weeks before the end of the term – and passing!
6 CU for term 7 (yes, one course, 6 CU)
And that’s it! 53 years old, after I’d just about given up, I FINALLY have my Bachelor of Science! I’m giving myself a month to mentally change gears, and do a little house cleaning and de-cluttering, and then it’s on to the job hunt with my shiny new degree!
Don’t listen to others, don’t compare. Find a pace that works for your and don’t give up and you will reach that goal!