Techosaurus

^^Part of my hypothetical fall schedule.

I’m in a bit of a pickle right now. I just registered 12 credits in fall semester (which is still about 3 months away). Following my usual habit, i lay everything out on a calendar thinking of everything normal that I will need to do every week. I lay out all of my classes including room numbers, sleep times, study times, work times, etc. Then I do some math about income, macro schedule (how long it’s going to take me to finish my degree, etc), and micro schedule (daily timing). I have pretty much narrowed it down to three major issues that need to be planned out before the fall semester ever starts: Money, Time, and Sanity.

My goal is to retain full time school status, and hopefully full time work status, but this will be difficult on the time and sanity requirement. After I laid everything out on the calendar, I came out with about 3 hrs of down time on school days, and about 45 minutes of down time on work days. That isn’t very much, even by swamped college student standards. This crazy busy schedule gets time and money out of the way, but I’m worried my sanity would go out the window after a few weeks of this. Not to mention, this all hinges on my work giving me the schedule that I need to even take these classes. Right now I have Sundays and Mondays off, but in order to even take some of the classes that I require, I would NEED to have Tuesdays and Thursdays off, so the Time aspect in this situation isn’t fully resolved yet.

Some would say that the answer to all of these problems is easy, get a part time job, sell your car, and focus on school. I did entertain this idea in my head for a bit. The problem is that I have a sought after, hard to get job, in my field of interest. Right now I’m getting experience in the same field as my degree, which means that I will graduate with real life experience on my resume, that is HUGE in today’s world. No company wants to hire someone with no experience; factoring in that the job market is terrible right now, and that it doesn’t look like it’s going to get much better for a while, it is probably in my best interest to stick with the job that I have right now. Time and Sanity and sanity are still both a problem though. If I did choose to get a part time job, that would take care of time and sanity, but money would become an even bigger issue. I would need to sell my car in order to stay afloat (and I just purchased it about a month ag0), and I would need to continue to live with my parents; even then, things would be tight. I would also lose the experience I’m getting as well, which could end up costing me jobs in the future. ugh, there are so many options.

I did some math and found that with my 71 credits left, taking 9 credits per semester (part time), would take me about 8 semesters to finish. There are 3 semesters per year, so that comes out to about 2.5 years to finish my degree. Taking 15 credits per semester (full time), would take me about 5 semesters to finish, so about 1.5 years. I guess what it really comes down to is, what is the worth of that extra year. Is it worth it to give up experience in order to finish school 1 year faster? At the moment, I’m leaning more towards sticking with my current job and working scheduling out with them somehow. I’m curious to know what someone else thinks though.

-Eric

Started off the day insanely groggy, I think that was daylight savings time messing me up last night, because I went to bed at like 4 am, then woke up at about 11:30.. I don’t do too hot with hrs of sleep being under 8.. oh well though. I got ready and went over to the house to take a look, it was sweet, and there is an unfinished basement, which is awesome. Tons of room for storage, a ping pong table, and the router will be down there so my server won’t disturb anyone. (yay). The bedroom I’ll be renting has it’s own bathroom, and a sweet jetted tub.. that will get used a ton. I got some more details on it, and threw down a deposit. Went back home laid down for a minute, then went to work.

Argh, work was insane.. so many chats, so many tickets. I was rarely not on 5 chats at a time, had about 22 chats per hour when I finished my regularly scheduled shift. After that I started pounding out tickets and got about 20 tickets per hour, which is unheard of.. I was busting those things out left and right. Got to work at 2:30 pm, left at about 3:00 am. The text was starting to get blurry on the screen, so I left.. that would have been bad for efficiency. In 10 hours I’ll be back for round two! <sarcasm> YES! </sarcasm>

I don’t think I could have made it through my day without my iPod, picked a song, turned on genius, rinse repeat. Went through a lot of metal, techno, and underground hip-hop. That thing has some amazing battery life.. I listened to music almost the entire time I was at work, and it was at 75% battery when I left. The only thing I used to use my iPod for was tunes in my Jeep.. but since I can’t stream from pandora anymore, the iPod is my music tool of choice.

Well, I probably ought to get some sleep, I’ll need it tomorrow. Night.