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Here's a random story from my life - I don't share those often enough for a personal blog, do I?
When I tell most people that I finished a 4-year undergraduate program (120 hours) in 3 years with 140 hours, they're typically amazed. "Wow, you must have been so focused and brilliant!" is the typical response.
Hardly.
I kid you not. I'm not simply going out of my way to be modest and humble. Though I do have long-term developmental plans, my original undergraduate long-term plan - of which I still have a copy - included no intentions of graduation in 3 years. Not the slightest notion of such a thing. So, how did this happen? It's somewhat complicated and is basically the result of a string of completely unrelated (and unplanned!) events that only led to me choosing the path of early graduation within my last year at UF - and for any current undergrads considering the same route, I must add that it is a decision around which I still harbor significant second guesses. In fact, the coupled decisions to graduate in 3 years and attend Carnegie Mellon are the first long-term decisions of my adult life around which I harbor doubts and significant regrets. Think very carefully before making such decisions!
It all actually started in my sophomore year - of high school. Though my high school was generally backwards in terms of advanced curriculum (and in terms of nearly everything else, in fact), they did start offering expanded dual/joint enrollment courses that year - 2002 - particularly in French. I had excelled in first year French, was beginning to develop an affinity for the language, and I thought that I could tackle French at a collegiate level. So, I enrolled in dual enrollment French. I did well in two semesters of introductory collegiate French as a sophomore and poof! - I had earned my first 4 college credits at age 14, my first 8 by age 15. In fact, I would go on to take all of the dual enrollment courses that were available to me in high school, and by the time I graduated I had 28 college credits - the equivalent of a full year of undergraduate study. I had no idea at the time, but these early credits would be critical in allowing me to graduate early.
By the time that I matriculated at UF in Fall of 2005, I was already a major Francophile and decided that I wanted to double major (DIS and French.) Unfortunately, those two subjects - one being from the realm of business/technology, the other from liberal arts - had completely incompatible course requirements, even somewhat different general education requirements. I juggled dozens of potential feasible 4-year schedules and determined that in order to complete the double major, I would have to take at least one summer with a full-time load (12 hours) of coursework. Fine with me; I had no other plans for my first summer and was not exactly thrilled with the idea of returning back to the hometown from which I had just spent the better part of 18 years working to escape.
I stayed in Gainesville in Summer 2006 to take courses. Over the course of that summer, I earned 12 credits, which is considered a full load for a normal semester; for a summer, it is a tremendous load, especially considering that I earned 8 of those credits in the 6-week Summer A term alone. First of all, I don't advise anybody to ever attempt that kind of a schedule over the summer unless they absolutely have to in order to graduate; during my entire time at UF, those summer months were my only generally unhappy period. That summer I also learned that summer coursework is financially discouraged in terms of financial aid, at least in the state of Florida. I had applied for a $3,000 loan to cover expenses and was informed by an employee in UF's prestigious Student Financial Affairs (SFA) office that this aid would be disbursed shortly after the start of the Summer A (first half of summer) semester. When I had not received a dime of money well into May and checked back with the SFA to see what was causing this inordinate delay, another employee informed me that I would not be getting any loan money due to the amount of financial aid I received during the normal school year.
Ah, summer 2006. Pleasant, pleasant memories. (Karen Fooks, the Director of UF's SFA office, is an absolute and total bitch, by the way. I hope that you never have the misfortune of meeting or dealing with her. I ended up meeting with her and some of her top deputies in October of 2006 to basically bitch her out on the low quality of her incredibly bureaucratic department, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed harsh verbal confrontation with an old woman so thoroughly.)
The financial aid stuff actually presented an interesting obstacle to my plans. As I started the Fall 2007 semester and looked at the courses that I would be taking, it became clear that fitting the full French major into my schedule - given some electives and Honors Program courses that I wanted to take - would be incredibly difficult without yet another summer semester or two. You see, the State of Florida isn't big on funding liberal arts/arts/humanities education, and getting into certain French electives wasn't going to be as easy as I had (naively) assumed; some core French courses that I needed weren't even offered during the semesters that I needed them. Again, if I were attempting to double major in something more compatible with my existing DIS major - say, accounting for example - I would have not faced these difficulties. And not only did I have to contend with all of the French core major courses, I also had to attempt to reconcile differences in general education courses between my native college - the Warrington College of Business Administration - and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, home to the French major. The biggest two obstacles were a science lab course and an additional composition course - both of which CLAS required but Warrington did not. By this point, I knew that I would not be staying in Gainesville during the summer of 2007, especially given the financial aid issues (a fairly large chunk of the income from my first internship went to pay off the debt I racked up from that summer.) I had my sights set on interning in South Florida, but instead - through a remarkably complex and funny series of events - ended up accepting an interview with ExxonMobil and, much to my amazement, being offered an internship with them in Houston during the summer of '07. Though having very little intention of living in Texas after graduating, it was a good offer, and I assumed (correctly) that Houston was similar to Dallas, a city I had visited before and liked. I accepted their offer in December 2006 with mixed feelings. (On a completely unrelated note, people occasionally inquire as to what events precipitated my transition from libertarianism to social democracy in the political arena. Working for ExxonMobil was a seminal event in that transition; maybe I'll blog in more detail on that later.)
As I finalized my Spring courses in January 2007, it finally became crystal clear to me that a French major would be infeasible without adding an extra year to my program of study, something I did not want to do simply for an extra piece of paper. So sometime during that semester, I decided to abandon that plan and instead settle for a minor in French. I filled out the official paperwork and relaxed; to be honest, I was never all that enthralled with the thought of having to take French Literature courses. However, even at this point I had absolutely no plans at all for graduating in 3 years - that thought still hadn't even occured to me. It first occured to me near the end of the Spring 2007 semester, as I looked at my degree audit and realized that I was - between the 28 hours of dual enrollment in high school, 12 hours during Summer 2006, and hardcore 18-hour semesters during the year - a full year ahead of where I should be according to my major roadmap. I never will forget the day - in April of 2007 - when I looked at my schedule and thought, for the first time, "You really could finish your undergrad degree in 3 years if you moved a few things around." Of course, it was just a passing thought at that time, not yet a serious consideration. Remember, I hadn't made any of those moves - the dual enrollment, Summer 2006 work, or max-load 18 hour semesters - with the intention to graduate early; if anything, those decisions were made to enable my dual degree aspirations. The tenative decision to utilize those earlier decisions to facilitate a three-year graduation would come during the summer.
Fast forward past my internship to August 2007, as I began (what would become) my last full year at UF. What was it that finally pushed me to decide to graduate in 3 years, chopping off a full year of attendance at a school that I loved? In reality, it was a rather complicated cocktail of factors. I knew that I was going to be continuing to graduate school, but I had passed up an opportunity to enter the combined degree program for my major (whereby you take some Master's degree courses while still an undergraduate and therefore obtain the Master's degree in 5 years instead of 5.5 or 6.) I began to realize that, by graduating in 3 years, I could even outperform the combined degree kids by getting a Master's degree in only 4.5 years - which is what I am currently on track to accomplish. (I decided to not enter UF's combined degree program because I didn't want to lock myself in so early, and because UF offered absolutely no financial aid for either grad school or the additional tuition I would have paid as an undergrad for grad school courses, meaning I would have had to come up with the extra money myself.) After interning with ExxonMobil I was extended an offer for another internship with them but rejected their offer in favor of another one, with KPMG (rather complicated set of reasons there as well, but you probably know that story.) This offer finally put me in South Florida - where I had always wanted to live anyway - but was also much more structured. Whereas ExxonMobil had essentially promised an indefinite string of summer internships for as long as I remained in college making progress towards my MS, KPMG's internship program was more definite, like all other Big 4 firms, typically only extended to people the year before they graduated, with the anticipation that they would return back to school for a semester or two and start working full-time immediately afterward. If I remained another full year at UF for undergrad and then expected to spend a year or two in grad school, this would have introduced some significant kinks into my prospect for continued summer internships - and I had no intention of going through the grueling process of corporate interviewing (on top of a heavy course load) for 2 more years in a row. And of course, we can't overlook the whole perennial long term/short-term axis that has long influenced all of my major life decisions. As I've elaborated on here in more than enough detail, over the last year I've moved from a blind obsession with the long-term to a much more nuanced, pragmatic balance of short-term happiness with long-term goals. But when I was making the graduate in 4 years versus 3 years decision, I was still firmly rooted in an obsession with the long-term at the detriment of, you know, now (i.e., when we're actually living and breathing.) In late 2007, I thus became increasingly obsessed with the notion of finishing college in 3 years. It was somewhat before the beginning of the Fall 2007 semester that I fully internalized the decision to graduate that year. Berkeley and UF - slightly later, Illinois - became the front runners, by a wide margin, in my choice of graduate schools. Berkeley was the only graduate school from which I was rejected, and I still have copies of my acceptance letters from UF and Illinois, along with a few other good schools. How I ended up at Carnegie Mellon is another somewhat complex story, one that will leave the rather nasty taste of regret in my mouth for a long time to come. But life goes on.
____________________________________________________________________
So there it is in a nutshell! So many people have asked me about how and why I finished undergrad in three years, and now you have the answers. Sure beats trying to tell this 20 minute story off of the top of my head to dozens of people...now I just direct them to this page!
When I tell most people that I finished a 4-year undergraduate program (120 hours) in 3 years with 140 hours, they're typically amazed. "Wow, you must have been so focused and brilliant!" is the typical response.
Hardly.
I kid you not. I'm not simply going out of my way to be modest and humble. Though I do have long-term developmental plans, my original undergraduate long-term plan - of which I still have a copy - included no intentions of graduation in 3 years. Not the slightest notion of such a thing. So, how did this happen? It's somewhat complicated and is basically the result of a string of completely unrelated (and unplanned!) events that only led to me choosing the path of early graduation within my last year at UF - and for any current undergrads considering the same route, I must add that it is a decision around which I still harbor significant second guesses. In fact, the coupled decisions to graduate in 3 years and attend Carnegie Mellon are the first long-term decisions of my adult life around which I harbor doubts and significant regrets. Think very carefully before making such decisions!
It all actually started in my sophomore year - of high school. Though my high school was generally backwards in terms of advanced curriculum (and in terms of nearly everything else, in fact), they did start offering expanded dual/joint enrollment courses that year - 2002 - particularly in French. I had excelled in first year French, was beginning to develop an affinity for the language, and I thought that I could tackle French at a collegiate level. So, I enrolled in dual enrollment French. I did well in two semesters of introductory collegiate French as a sophomore and poof! - I had earned my first 4 college credits at age 14, my first 8 by age 15. In fact, I would go on to take all of the dual enrollment courses that were available to me in high school, and by the time I graduated I had 28 college credits - the equivalent of a full year of undergraduate study. I had no idea at the time, but these early credits would be critical in allowing me to graduate early.
By the time that I matriculated at UF in Fall of 2005, I was already a major Francophile and decided that I wanted to double major (DIS and French.) Unfortunately, those two subjects - one being from the realm of business/technology, the other from liberal arts - had completely incompatible course requirements, even somewhat different general education requirements. I juggled dozens of potential feasible 4-year schedules and determined that in order to complete the double major, I would have to take at least one summer with a full-time load (12 hours) of coursework. Fine with me; I had no other plans for my first summer and was not exactly thrilled with the idea of returning back to the hometown from which I had just spent the better part of 18 years working to escape.
I stayed in Gainesville in Summer 2006 to take courses. Over the course of that summer, I earned 12 credits, which is considered a full load for a normal semester; for a summer, it is a tremendous load, especially considering that I earned 8 of those credits in the 6-week Summer A term alone. First of all, I don't advise anybody to ever attempt that kind of a schedule over the summer unless they absolutely have to in order to graduate; during my entire time at UF, those summer months were my only generally unhappy period. That summer I also learned that summer coursework is financially discouraged in terms of financial aid, at least in the state of Florida. I had applied for a $3,000 loan to cover expenses and was informed by an employee in UF's prestigious Student Financial Affairs (SFA) office that this aid would be disbursed shortly after the start of the Summer A (first half of summer) semester. When I had not received a dime of money well into May and checked back with the SFA to see what was causing this inordinate delay, another employee informed me that I would not be getting any loan money due to the amount of financial aid I received during the normal school year.
Ah, summer 2006. Pleasant, pleasant memories. (Karen Fooks, the Director of UF's SFA office, is an absolute and total bitch, by the way. I hope that you never have the misfortune of meeting or dealing with her. I ended up meeting with her and some of her top deputies in October of 2006 to basically bitch her out on the low quality of her incredibly bureaucratic department, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed harsh verbal confrontation with an old woman so thoroughly.)
The financial aid stuff actually presented an interesting obstacle to my plans. As I started the Fall 2007 semester and looked at the courses that I would be taking, it became clear that fitting the full French major into my schedule - given some electives and Honors Program courses that I wanted to take - would be incredibly difficult without yet another summer semester or two. You see, the State of Florida isn't big on funding liberal arts/arts/humanities education, and getting into certain French electives wasn't going to be as easy as I had (naively) assumed; some core French courses that I needed weren't even offered during the semesters that I needed them. Again, if I were attempting to double major in something more compatible with my existing DIS major - say, accounting for example - I would have not faced these difficulties. And not only did I have to contend with all of the French core major courses, I also had to attempt to reconcile differences in general education courses between my native college - the Warrington College of Business Administration - and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, home to the French major. The biggest two obstacles were a science lab course and an additional composition course - both of which CLAS required but Warrington did not. By this point, I knew that I would not be staying in Gainesville during the summer of 2007, especially given the financial aid issues (a fairly large chunk of the income from my first internship went to pay off the debt I racked up from that summer.) I had my sights set on interning in South Florida, but instead - through a remarkably complex and funny series of events - ended up accepting an interview with ExxonMobil and, much to my amazement, being offered an internship with them in Houston during the summer of '07. Though having very little intention of living in Texas after graduating, it was a good offer, and I assumed (correctly) that Houston was similar to Dallas, a city I had visited before and liked. I accepted their offer in December 2006 with mixed feelings. (On a completely unrelated note, people occasionally inquire as to what events precipitated my transition from libertarianism to social democracy in the political arena. Working for ExxonMobil was a seminal event in that transition; maybe I'll blog in more detail on that later.)
As I finalized my Spring courses in January 2007, it finally became crystal clear to me that a French major would be infeasible without adding an extra year to my program of study, something I did not want to do simply for an extra piece of paper. So sometime during that semester, I decided to abandon that plan and instead settle for a minor in French. I filled out the official paperwork and relaxed; to be honest, I was never all that enthralled with the thought of having to take French Literature courses. However, even at this point I had absolutely no plans at all for graduating in 3 years - that thought still hadn't even occured to me. It first occured to me near the end of the Spring 2007 semester, as I looked at my degree audit and realized that I was - between the 28 hours of dual enrollment in high school, 12 hours during Summer 2006, and hardcore 18-hour semesters during the year - a full year ahead of where I should be according to my major roadmap. I never will forget the day - in April of 2007 - when I looked at my schedule and thought, for the first time, "You really could finish your undergrad degree in 3 years if you moved a few things around." Of course, it was just a passing thought at that time, not yet a serious consideration. Remember, I hadn't made any of those moves - the dual enrollment, Summer 2006 work, or max-load 18 hour semesters - with the intention to graduate early; if anything, those decisions were made to enable my dual degree aspirations. The tenative decision to utilize those earlier decisions to facilitate a three-year graduation would come during the summer.
Fast forward past my internship to August 2007, as I began (what would become) my last full year at UF. What was it that finally pushed me to decide to graduate in 3 years, chopping off a full year of attendance at a school that I loved? In reality, it was a rather complicated cocktail of factors. I knew that I was going to be continuing to graduate school, but I had passed up an opportunity to enter the combined degree program for my major (whereby you take some Master's degree courses while still an undergraduate and therefore obtain the Master's degree in 5 years instead of 5.5 or 6.) I began to realize that, by graduating in 3 years, I could even outperform the combined degree kids by getting a Master's degree in only 4.5 years - which is what I am currently on track to accomplish. (I decided to not enter UF's combined degree program because I didn't want to lock myself in so early, and because UF offered absolutely no financial aid for either grad school or the additional tuition I would have paid as an undergrad for grad school courses, meaning I would have had to come up with the extra money myself.) After interning with ExxonMobil I was extended an offer for another internship with them but rejected their offer in favor of another one, with KPMG (rather complicated set of reasons there as well, but you probably know that story.) This offer finally put me in South Florida - where I had always wanted to live anyway - but was also much more structured. Whereas ExxonMobil had essentially promised an indefinite string of summer internships for as long as I remained in college making progress towards my MS, KPMG's internship program was more definite, like all other Big 4 firms, typically only extended to people the year before they graduated, with the anticipation that they would return back to school for a semester or two and start working full-time immediately afterward. If I remained another full year at UF for undergrad and then expected to spend a year or two in grad school, this would have introduced some significant kinks into my prospect for continued summer internships - and I had no intention of going through the grueling process of corporate interviewing (on top of a heavy course load) for 2 more years in a row. And of course, we can't overlook the whole perennial long term/short-term axis that has long influenced all of my major life decisions. As I've elaborated on here in more than enough detail, over the last year I've moved from a blind obsession with the long-term to a much more nuanced, pragmatic balance of short-term happiness with long-term goals. But when I was making the graduate in 4 years versus 3 years decision, I was still firmly rooted in an obsession with the long-term at the detriment of, you know, now (i.e., when we're actually living and breathing.) In late 2007, I thus became increasingly obsessed with the notion of finishing college in 3 years. It was somewhat before the beginning of the Fall 2007 semester that I fully internalized the decision to graduate that year. Berkeley and UF - slightly later, Illinois - became the front runners, by a wide margin, in my choice of graduate schools. Berkeley was the only graduate school from which I was rejected, and I still have copies of my acceptance letters from UF and Illinois, along with a few other good schools. How I ended up at Carnegie Mellon is another somewhat complex story, one that will leave the rather nasty taste of regret in my mouth for a long time to come. But life goes on.
____________________________________________________________________
So there it is in a nutshell! So many people have asked me about how and why I finished undergrad in three years, and now you have the answers. Sure beats trying to tell this 20 minute story off of the top of my head to dozens of people...now I just direct them to this page!
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