This is why I started this blog.

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post, because I am in my last semester of school and it is busy. This is pretty normal, and is the reason I have not seen many of my friends outside of college.

This post is also going to be short, because I am in the middle of reading for some of my classes and we are about to start midterms. I just wanted to get this post in because it is important to me. I want to be able to look back at this post in a couple of years.

You see, I have been doing internships throughout my time at college. Five of the internships were at the same place, because I love the work environment and the product they make. I was waiting for an offer that was supposed to come this past week, and it did not come.

Now, I have to brush up my resume and start looking for a job. There is still a chance I may get an offer, but it won’t be until a few days before my graduation date. If the offer doesn’t come then, I will be two months behind on a job search.

I probably won’t make another post until after I graduate, but I wanted this post down, so I can look back and remember the feeling. It’s tough.

If I could do my ‘startover’ again.

I am not talking about if I could have gone to school at 18 here. I am talking about my choice to go to a 4 year university from the very beginning.

Starting at a 4 year university put me in a spot to start looking for internships from the very beginning, and in the engineering field most of the internships are paid. This would come in handy, because I still had a mortgage to pay even though I quit my day job.

In retrospect, I could have gone to a smaller school to start off, and then transfer into the University of Georgia and that would have saved a lot of money. I recommend looking into this option if you are thinking of going back to school.

The plan was to downsize the home while I was in school and that would free up the money to pay for college, and that was a good plan but I recommend downsizing before you start. The stress of the finances does take a toll on your schoolwork, and everything else about life.

Also, I mentioned in an earlier post about fear making many of my decisions and this is no exception. I was afraid I would not be able to transfer into the school, so I chose to start at the school instead. I realized this would cost more, but once you are in you just have to keep going. you don’t have to worry about applying again.

This fear is not realistic, because if you were able to get in at the beginning transferring in later should not be hard. So don’t let that same fear cost you so much money. It is going to take just as long to pay off the student loans as with your younger classmates, but there is less time until retirement age. (Is that still a thing?)

Either way you go (transfer in or start at the school you want to finish in), just don’t stop until you are done. You started school with a goal in mind, and you want to make sure that goal is realized.

Oh man, what am I doing!

So, my plan is to write about the changes I choose to make in my life and the results of those changes, but now that I have this outlet I am all over the place in my head about what I can write about. I was kind of expecting writer’s block to help me take my time in creating posts, lol.

I guess it is a new toy and I just want to play with it.

So I need to come up with a plan on what to write and how to organize it, and I am thinking this will be a possible outline for my blog.

Section one will be about going to college from age 38 to 43. Some colleges cater to this age group, and that could have been more affordable and would have worked more with a full time job at the same time. that is something you should consider if you are thinking about going to school at this age. My plan at the beginning was to go to school with the support of my wife, but things don’t always work out the way you expect them to. Hearing about my path may help you make different choices when planning your path.

Section two will be about what I want going forward. I will be starting out with a degree and more debt than I have ever had before that wasn’t tied to a home, and that is a scary picture to me. I will be planning how to pay off the student loans and credit card debt I grew as a result of the choice in school, work, and the divorce. With the divorce, I would have still had the student loans, but the credit card debt would have been much lower if we stuck to our original plan. Just a reminder here, I am not going to go into details of the cause of divorce, but it definitely impacted my financial outcome here.

Section three will be about my personal growth. I have made more choices in my life based on fear than I realized, and fear limits what we are capable of achieving. I want to address these fears I have had for most of my life, and in situations where I can share the cause while respecting other’s privacy I will. I understand my choice not to explain what others have done will affect your opinion of me, and I choose to respect their privacy anyway. What is more important to me is not where they failed me, but where I failed me. I can change myself (which will be hard), but I cannot change someone else.

Section four will be a random section. It may lead to future sections later, but I am noticing I come up with stuff I may feel like writing about that doesn’t fit in any of the other sections, and also doesn’t necessarily represent something I want to continue writing about. Any of that stuff will go into this section.

Jimmy

Hello! This will be a little about my background.

I am 43 years old, and I am starting my last semester at the University of Georgia. I was a mechanic for twenty years before starting for my Bachelors in Engineering. I started as a mechanic as soon as I graduated highschool, and swore I would die before I stepped a foot on a college campus.

Well, I must have died when I was 38. I started UGA in the fall of 2015, and I wanted to start telling my story then, but I didn’t feel there was much to say at that point. I was just a person who wanted a different job, and there was no way to tell if I would be able to finish what I had started. I just didn’t want to start the story and then fizzle out before the story was able to be finished.

As I said earlier, I am starting my last semester and I should graduate from UGA in Dec 2020. This is why I wanted to start telling the story now. When I started, I was able to find stories about people who had already succeeded, and those stories didn’t help encourage me. When we are looking back, we don’t remember the intensity of the challenges we faced. I am hoping that as I start to tell my story now, I still know the intensities of the challenges here at school.

Also, moving forward I don’t know that I will succeed just because I have a new career. I don’t even have a starting offer yet. All I know is I will have successfully completed the degree. After getting a job (no small feat in this economy) I still have to make good financial decisions to not be broke. Having worked a full career before college has shown me that just because you have a good income does not mean you are doing well.

My long term goal moving forward is to gain financial independence from the job I don’t even have yet. To be clear, that doesn’t mean I will quit the job, it just means I won’t be dependent on the job to provide for me anymore. My thinking is that if I don’t have to worry about my paycheck, I will be able to enjoy the job more.

If you decide to follow this journey, it is going to take many years to tell the story. This is the nature of my decision to tell the story as it happens and not after the fact.

What is it like going to school with a younger generation?

Sometimes it can be lonely. Most (probably all) of my classmates are closer to my son’s age than mine, and when I started I was told there are many students my age at the university. With the size of the school and number attending I do believe they were telling the truth, but I never saw them. I would see the occasional student in my age group, but they were working toward a Masters or Doctorate. The closest I would see to my age group working toward a Baccalaureate would still be over five years younger than myself.

I am part of the generation X and most of my classmates are part of generation Z, so that puts a whole generation between us (millennials). If I got these names wrong, or if you disagree with how I am categorizing here the point is there is a big difference in my background and my classmates’ backgrounds.

Thankfully memes were there to bridge the gap. I would make references to movies I had seen when I was younger, and most people would get the reference based solely on the memes.

What I found overall was a great chance to meet a much younger generation in a setting that made us equals. I was not in a mentoring position with a younger employee, because we were all just trying to learn the material and do well in the class. What advantage I brought to them from my years of experience, they matched with their knowledge of technology. They truly took technology in with their baby food, and their help made my success possible.

To understand that last statement, you have to know how the classes are managed now. In a class that is 100% in person, the syllabus is kept online and will be updated throughout the semester. Many classes had to homework turned in online, or was even done completely through an app for the subject. You cannot do these classes–that are 100% in person–without access to a computer, smart phone, or some type of digital device, and there is no class to teach you how to use it or where to even get the app. Sometimes there is a link in the syllabus to the app.

To my classmates who helped me learn these apps. Thank you.

I was surprised to see how much some of them would come to mean to me though. I expected to see alot of the “I went to college to get away from my parents” from my classmates. I never expected rudeness or disrespect, but I expected there would be to much difference to build strong friendships.

Some of my friends have become as important after only knowing them for two years as people I have known for ten, twenty, even thirty years. (That’s longer than any of them have been alive.)

I have found them to be smart, hardworking, friendly, and caring. I could be in a much different situation now if I had gone to school when I was 18, but I think having met this group and this generation in this setting has been a wonderful experience. And I am glad to have done it at this age instead.

Lost in the Woods

When I was a little boy, I would love to play in the woods. My sisters and I spent alot of time riding our bicycles in the woods behind our house. Now as an adult, I enjoy going on hikes in the woods. The farther away from civilization the more I seem to enjoy it. I have not had the chance to go on an overnight hike, but I am looking forward to trying that when I am done with school. I feel a certain comfort from being in the woods, and will often go on a short hike at a nearby park when I need to think things through.

Walking in the woods is one of the few things I have been able to take back from my childhood in the last couple of years. In this blog, I do not plan on mentioning all of the changes I have gone through in the last couple of years to protect the privacy of others involved in those changes, but suffice it to say my life is completely different than it was six years ago. It is also completely different than I had planned on it being.

I had planned on starting a new career that required a degree, and I thought about how much it would cost to make those changes. If you are thinking about making big changes, you need to think about how much the changes are going to cost you. Then you can decide if the change is something you can afford to do, and if you really want the change knowing the cost.

After you decide to begin the change, you will see other costs come up that you didn’t account for. These costs are not all financial. And, some of them you will have to pay even if you decide to quit.

Whether you decide to quit or not, I would not consider the act of quitting a failure. When you try to make a change this big, you are moving in the dark to some extent. When you get more information about the path you are going, you will be able to make a better decision about the change. Sometimes you only know what all is going to change after you begin the process, and I think deciding that your old life is preferable to the change is not automatically a bad decision.

There is a certain amount of being lost that goes along with change, and you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty. I find that comfort in my relationship with God, and I reinforce that comfort by going to church where I get encouragement from others who know God and from hobbies I enjoy by myself that show me I am doing what I enjoy and not what others want me to enjoy.

This leads to two different story-lines that I plan on spending more time with in future blogs. One is my relationship with God and reading the Bible, and the other is rediscovering who I am as an individual. Hopefully both of these will make me a better father, but I don’t plan on sharing many details about my son to protect his privacy.

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