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.
Tags: College, Do It Yourself, Education, Google, High School, Self-Taught
