Self Taught College-Level Education
Qualifications: Competent and resourceful
I dropped out of North Atlanta High School my senior year, one month before my five Advanced Placement (AP) exams (Biology, Calculus, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, US History). I had been offered my first “real job” as a Marketing Coordinator at Wiley Music (who later merged with Sixthman), a music management and marketing company based in Atlanta. They never asked when I was suppose to graduate and I never told them. I suffered from senioritis for two solid years and was annoyed by the “busy work” and laggard pace of my classes.
The following year, I earned my GED with a perfect score in two sections. The woman who administered the test asked me why I was there. I told her I had received a job offer that I felt was a step towards the career I was interested in pursuing (music marketing). She allowed me to leave early since I finished so quickly, despite policy.
Skip ahead to 2007. I determined music marketing in Atlanta would not make me happy and took a paid internship at an interactive/search company in town. I had five years of music and online marketing experience under my belt but was eager to pursue the technology side of my previous campaigns more hands-on. In 2007, I also registered for my very first college classes at Georgia State University as a Computer Science major. A semester and a half later I was forced to drop out due to a death in the family.
I am almost seven years into my adult life and not having a college degree has not cost me an opportunity or job yet. I believe in the importance of education but I feel an individual’s needs vary. Programs are too cookie-cutter to work for everyone. I don’t want to be retaught the same four lines I have known for four years. I have learned everything I know from experience, peers, research and trial and error. Learning in this way, I feel my knowledge of certain areas is stronger than those who learned from a class. However I don’t come with a course outline or list of suggested reading materials — which leads to gaps in the knowledge base aka my brain. I have decided that I don’t want to spend any more money taking remedial classes in order to achieve “credits” necessary to move ahead with my education.
How I plan to teach myself a college-level education without a college: I will take advantage of Google’s inclusion of PDFs & DOCs within their search results. I am searching for college courses at leading universities that cover topics I would like to study further in depth. Using Google, I plan to locate a syllabus for each course and aggregate resources (books, case studies, websites) and so forth to develop my own at-home course. Many of these texts are available on Amazon used. There are also numerous lectures available online via free podcasts and audio files. My goal is to begin in January with no end date.
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December 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 am
A degree is overrated. If I had relied on it alone, I’d be a miserable newspaper or PR writer somewhere. I’m a web developer, and happy to be one, and those skills were 100 percent self-taught.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Man, I wish aircraft structural engineering worked like that.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
What areas are you planning on studying? I keep the textbooks from most of my CS classes; let me know if you’d possibly want to borrow any of them.
Other places you might want to check out:
MIT OpenCourseWare
Stanford School of Engineering (CS included)
Hacker News – Great community for general info / recommendations
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Darren – Initially traditional marketing, since I have been working with agencies to integrate social media and new online marketing tactics into their existing marketing plans. It would help me better understand how they developed their existing campaigns and their concerns and considerations when integrating in new components.
I will let you know when I get towards the CS-related stuff. Thanks.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Hi Tessa.
A twisting winding road of links got me here and to a subject that I must comment on.
A few thoughts from a highly auto-didactic systems analyst and programmer that dropped out of CS and CIS programs but still got a degree.
As I see it, a degree is maybe 25% of the value of college. The other 75% is in the personal networking and sense of accomplishment from achieving the non-trivial task of completing a degree program. It doesn’t make you smart or even competent, but it does say that you stuck with a program and finished it. That’s not the end all be all, but it is something.
On that 20% that does count, I think one of the biggest benefits of formal education comes from being forced to study things that wouldn’t really interest you otherwise. I had to take accounting, finance, and economics for a CIS degree and hated every second of it, but now I am very happy that I did as they benefit me tremendously in all aspects of my life.
As for the remedial thing, I think I understand. For my entire life I have consistently scored in the 90+ percentile on verbal tests (from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to the GRE), but due to a transfer issue I was forced to take a 101 English class as well as a remedial class for the Georgia Regents test on my dime. I moaned and complained but eventually sucked it up, took the courses, and came out a better writer / critical analyst than before. There is always something to learn and space to refine.
At the end of the day there is a question of what you’re trying to accomplish. If it’s a matter of getting jobs or making money, that’s easy to do without a degree. A degree would help, but unless you’re going for a clasically professional career (e.g. doctor or lawyer) a clearly bright person such as yourself would be wasting her time. However, if your goal is personal enrichment, I think that taking one or two courses per semester for however long you’d like (took me 10 years) could enhance the types of learning you already do by leaps and bounds.
I think the key is to go after something that you wouldn’t or couldn’t study on your own. For me it was business management, and I am eternally grateful for what I learned. So much so that I decided to get a graduate degree. I hope that doesn’t take ten years as well.
Take care…
January 16th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Hey Rashid – Thanks for the comment!
I absolutely agree with you. I’d perhaps go even further to say that I think there’s a 40% worth in the college experience. You do study topics in courses you normally would avoid that could open you up to tremendous opportunities, leads, and so forth. It teaches you many general business and life skills. These things are of the utmost importance.
I wholeheartedly believe 99% of the population should follow this path, regardless of how long it takes them to complete. I feel as if my drive is one of the most powerful things moving me in both my personal and professional life. As I alluded to in my blog post, I always love what I do for a living. It has gradually evolved throughout my career but through trying new things, I have found myself in a position where I am even happier. How could I have known at 18 that instead of working with technology in the entertainment industry that I would prefer to work in the technology industry with entertainment? I could not have learned this in any class in school. My drive has allowed me to experience a variety of activities in my personal life as well from my love of wine to flat-track roller derby.
My rant is reminding me of an article I read recently with Guy Kawasaki (can’t find link right now, I apologize!) discussing the personality type of entrepreneurs. I could completely relate to it. The notion that entrepreneurs could be considered a little ADD due to multi-tasking capabilities and ambition was the general point driven in the story.
I apologize that this ranting doesn’t appear to have a clear direction – it is a Friday afternoon afterall!
Point being – why should I go to college to study something I could not study on my own when I am happy with my career and life? As you begin to touch on in your reply, the only things I could study in college that I couldn’t teach myself are topics along the lines of medicine, art, a trade or law. All of which I could teach myself at their own redemial levels using resources online, at libraries, and so forth.
Best, Tessa
January 28th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Just stumbled onto this post after reading your Street Team one. I 100% agree with you here. I think college is probably the right choice for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went away to school to get a degree in Music Education. 4 months into the program I knew being locked away in a practice room for 4-6 hours a day was not how I wanted to spend the next 4 years of my life. A bunch of random events lead me to Tennessee and working for a major media corporation. I’ve busted my ass to get where I am, always going above and beyond my job title and responsibilities. I now have a lot of colleagues going back to school for MBA’s because they just don’t know any other way of getting ahead. They think somehow that piece of paper will give them the key to move ahead in their current job or break through to a better one. If only they knew what you and I do.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Oh the false confidence that a silly piece of paper holds! There are too many variables to be able to rely on a degree designed to fit the “average” population per field. Cheers to those who find the path they know they need to take, whatever it may be.
February 4th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Great post Tess, I am in the same boat as you, except I finished high school… barely though (not an overachiever by any means). I was at Florida International University for about 1 semester, then off the Broward Community College for the remainder of my college sentence, but only ended up with 44 credits before I switched to a technical school.
By that time I was a young web developer and teaching myself a lot, based on curiosity and pure love for programming. The technical school gave me some more pieces to the puzzle which then gave me the much bigger picture, but all I have for “papers” is a two-year associates, which I don’t even know where it’s stored. Experience is my teacher and I like it like that! As of date, I’m a web manager for a government agency and the sole provider for my family (wife and three kids) – so I’ve done good!
You’re plan for self education sounds like a lot of fun! Keep us posted on your progress.