In which I visit my alma mater and contemplate returning

Late Friday afternoon I got an email from from a big shot in the head office asking if I could make it to a meeting in Wisconsin Rapids at 11 am to “talk about my future at the company”. Well, you can’t refuse an offer like that, so I said I’d be there.

The big news in today’s meeting was that I have a new boss, a new title, and new responsibilities. (Or I will in a month or so when this goes “public”.) I will be an applications engineer working on various database projects. This will require more travel (like my trip to Texas this coming week) and more time spent in Wisconsin Rapids.

There was a time when I would have been thrilled to learn that I would be working on database projects again but I think that ship has sailed. I am fairly disenchanted with this company and I really don’t like Wisconsin Rapids. The projects aren’t that thrilling either. Ooo, I get to work on an inventory system for the phone company? Someone catch me, I’m gonna faint from the excitement!

I left Wisconsin Rapids a little after noon. The sun was peeking out and I was in no hurry to get back to work, so I decided to go to Stevens Point and get some stuff done at UWSP.

When I got my checking account here in Wausau, the credit union officer mentioned that my credit report had an outstanding balance from UWSP that was at a collections agency. I thought I had paid off all my UWSP debt. So today I stopped in at UWSP’s accounts receivable office and they agree with me; everything has been paid. That’s a load off my mind. I had images of thousands of dollars of unpaid debt… Now I can get a credit report, see if a UWSP debt really is listed, and raise holy hell if it is.

Curious to see if my good luck would hold, I went up to Admissions. After explaining my situation to a nice lady, she informed me that I hadn’t been suspended. I am merely on probation, which means that I wouldn’t have to go through the appeals process to get readmitted. All I have to do is fill out the form and I’m a student again. This is especially nice since I am still under the 97-98 catalog and I wouldn’t have to take a bunch more general degree requirements (GDRs) that have been added since 97-98.

Since I was on a roll, I went over to Registration. I got a copy of my Academic Progress Report. More good news; I only GDR that I need is a single 3 credit writing emphasis course.

Then the big one; my major; Computer and Information Systems (CIS). I went to the department head and chatted with him about my situation. He remembered me (which probably didn’t work to my advantage). He grunted and winced a lot as he looked at my transcript. You see, the majority of my computer courses are from the early 90s. Things have changed since then. The plan that he came up with would require me to take one 3 credit CIS course, three 4 credit CIS courses, and a 3 credit math course.

So there it is. 21 credits and I would be out. That’s not quite even two full-time semesters. Start classes in fall of ’05 and graduate in spring of ’06 (a mere dozen years behind schedule). (Okay, technically there is a little problem with prerequisites, but I hope I could get them to let me take Production Programming concurrently with Interactive Web Programming. I’ve been doing those things professionally for close to a decade…)

But do I want to do it? Do I really want to go back to school?

After getting all that info, I stopped by Pat’s office. He and I went down to the campus coffee shop / study area and talked about life for awhile.

Being on campus today was a very nice feeling. I am really excited about some of the courses I would get to take. (Oddly enough, Math 209: Mathematics for Information Science is the most appealing.) It would only be a year and I would get a lot of future job flexibility and potential pay hikes from it. My current lack of debt means that I probably could even get away without having a job for those 9 months if I had to (although I probably could move to part-time at my current job). And then there are those college girls…

The more I think about it, the harder it is to come up with any significant downsides to the idea. I’m not happy here in Wausau, I’m not thrilled with where I work, I have no particular reason to move to any other city… It would put me on a road to a destination, which is something that I have not had in a long time. And I think I am mentally ready for something like that.

Of course, tomorrow everything could look very different. Things always do after a good night’s sleep.