Over the past four plus months, upon writing this on June 24, 2024 at 3:05 am AST, I had been working on my finishing my Bachelor of Science, Computer Science from Western Governors University. I am proud to say that I am now a proud graduate of WGU and will be attending commencement in September; I already bought the airline tickets plus the cap and gown. In this post I will outline my experience going through the curriculum at WGU, how many credits I transferred from where, and total up how long it took me to finish my degree and outline my plans for the future.

But first, let me outline why I did this. I’ve been working for close to 9 years as a software engineer, including 2 years of internships and 7+ years of non-internship work experience. I had been thrusted onto the roll of senior software engineer in my last job over the course of two years and had lead a team of 6 other developers. I felt like I was at the top of my game, but something was missing, but what? I was noticing that I was starting to lack in certain areas of theoretical knowledge and lacked the structure and accountability to master them. I had attempted a degree before, once in 2013 through 2017 as a computer engineering student at the University of Puerto Rico, and then transferred over to Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico when I found hardware too uninteresting and difficult. During the transfer, nearly nothing had transferred over so I had to start all over again, I was the equivalent of a Junior or Sophomore, it was rough. Over the course of three years, I was passing classes left and right, keeping an above 3.0 GPA while also holding down a full-time 9 to 5 job.

Then in 2020, the pandemic went into its apogee. It had reached PR and all classes were moved online and it was rough. It was after a few horrible experiences with professors and students who didn’t know how to work the online format that I decided to instead focus on my career, as I also didn’t have time to finish my degree, or so I thought. Fast forward to 2023 and I found out about WGU. At first I was skeptical, I had always been about online universities, but the more I dug the more I was interested and even impressed. I found out the school was fully accredited, not only regionally, but by ABET. So I decided to take the plunge and in September of 2023 I pre-enrolled and picked a Fall 2024 start date and over the course of three months I rushed to finish as many of the general ed courses as I could at Sophia.org. Come February 1st, 2024, I had been pre-studying for a month for my first official WGU course, Discrete Mathematics II. The great thing about WGU is that classes are competency-based, which means that you simply have to prove that you know the material through either a test, a project, or a combination of both. DMII was a proctored test taking 140 minutes. I didn’t want to waste time, so I looked up all the material for the test before I was officially enrolled, and started studying and practicing every single day after work. I am proud to say that I passed that course with flying colors. That bit of success and the quickness with which I was able to get it over with was exactly what I needed to keep me going.

Over the course of the next four and a half months, I was moving at a pace of around 4 courses a month. I worked with my mentor to make sure I did all my Objective Assessments (exams) courses first. I didn’t want to waste time near the end of my six month term studying so that I could focus on all the projects I needed to do and finally my capstone project. And let me tell you, it was intense. My days basically consisted of working and studying during my free time and taking exams at odd hours of the night. Later when I got to just my Performance Assessment courses, my time consisted of working on my projects during my off hours. It was honestly, pretty amazing. I was doing projects that helped me learned relevant skills and put my knowledge into practice. In my Data Structures and Algorithms II course, I had to write a delivery truck program that found the best path for delivering packages using three trucks, but only two of which could be active at the same time. I was forced to use python, invent my own loading algorithms and keep everything original. And in my capstone project I needed to develop a machine learning model and use it in an application with a topic of my choosing, which obviously gave me a nice introduction of machine learning methods.

In a little over 4 months time, I finished 61 Competency Units (basically credit hours) and obtained my degree on June 11th, 2024. I had transferred over 62 CUs from between my previous schools, UPR (8 CUs), PUPR (34 CUs), and Sophia.org (20CUs). I finished 19 classes in 4.5 months and earned a Axelos ITIL Foundation Certificate.

Why did I do this? Simple. I wanted my degree and I wanted to be able to apply for a masters program. At the time of writing this I have applied for three schools, Georgia Tech’s OMSCS, UT Austin’s MSCSO, and ASU’s MCS Online. I want to get a masters because an unfortunate reality is that now a days most everyone in software has bachelors and between 50% to 90% of applicants have masters degrees, so I need to catch up. My top choices are Georgia Tech and UT Austin, though ASU’s curriculum may turn out to be faster, with two 7.5 week sessions per Spring and Fall semester, allowing for me to take 2 classes a semester plus a summer, finishing in 1.5 years if taking only one class per session. That might well be worth the $15k the degree costs, we’ll see.

In any case, that’s what got me up to this point. I’ll be going to my commencement in Orlando this September and I’m sure that by that time I should know which of the three schools have accepted me and which one I’m going to attend. I’ll be posting and update for that then. For now, I’m just going to take it easy and learn about some machine learning on the side, maybe read a few books on it or do some online courses and perhaps refresh my linear algebra, but for now I’lll just be getting back to my life being school free, just for a little while until Spring 2025. Then the real fun begins.