What colleges have you attended?

Sometimes things in life don’t go the way we expected. Certainly for myself, I didn’t expect to be blogging.

I love reading science fiction and fantasy, and creating my own worlds and stories. I enjoy writing to some degree, I say knowing that probably sounds weird WHILE blogging and talking about wanting to finish a novel (that hopefully gets published someday), but my education doesn’t exactly match up to what I’m saying. Sit down, strap in, and I’ll explain.

I failed my Freshman English class.

Not college Freshman English. High school Freshman English.

Wait, what?

Surprise! Yes, I failed my high school Freshman English class. Not because I was bad at English, but because I was just overall a bad student. Always have been, and probably always will be when it comes to regimented and structured education. Anyways, if this prompt is asking about college education why am I bringing up high school? Because this led to me taking an online class to try and make up the grade before I would be allowed to graduate high school, and oddly enough it was provided through BYU. So, closing in on 20 years ago, I was TECHNICALLY a college student, if you want to count it this way. Guess what happened next…

I didn’t finish that course!

So, how did I get out of it and why was I allowed to graduate at all and subsequently move on to ACTUAL college education? Well, this all happened right around the time of my Dad’s tenuous job situation that ultimately led to my family moving from the suburbs of Colorado to small town country living South Dakota. I finished my Junior year of high school taking roughly the same classes I had been in before the move, and I discovered that the curriculum out here was behind what I was learning in Colorado, so I was ahead of my classmates. Senior year of high school I had gotten out of gym/P.E. classes which left me open to take the last Freshman English credit I needed to graduate. I lucked out there, but I do feel a little bad that my Dad had to spend money on that online remedial class I never finished.

So, there’s part one, I was a BYU student for a couple months. Technically.

My ACTUAL college education was through CTU (Colorado Technical University) which weirdly had a campus out here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I was still a mediocre student at best. I tried in the beginning and then found ways to coast through some classes (no, I didn’t cheat or plagiarize anything) and other classes I did end up failing. A couple of them weren’t entirely my fault, though. Anyways, I did okay at my writing assignments for actual college level courses, and did even better when it came to business documentation. I ended up switching degrees at one point and landed more courses that were business focused, but I was still in an IT-related degree track so I was stuck in the IT Capstone course. I ended up capitalizing on my writing ability for my IT Capstone final, which was a group project, because my peers were more focused on IT/programming degrees and they hated writing out business documentation.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but for me writing this post and going down memory lane was more of a mild memory rollercoaster. I’m sure I could share more as well but this post would probably get way too long for some people’s patience. Anyways, here we are, with me going from “bad student failing English” to “still a bad student but college writing was fine” and finally “I write more documentation for a living, and want to write fantasy novels.”

Well, let’s see where 2024 takes me.