Wow, its been a while since I've posted to a blog. There are has been so many changes in my life.
I've lost my job, went back to school, received my AAS in Information Security and Digital Forensics, and onto my Bachelors in IT-Security now at Western Governors University.
I found out about WGU actually from a supervisor on an internship. I was doing an internship with my community college's security engineer, working on configuring the school's IDS and every week he had these calls he had to do with someone he had said was his student mentor. After asking him futher he mentioned he was going for his Masters in Security from a school called WGU. I thought that was pretty cool, but tossed it out of my mind. As time went by, graduated and began looking for a job. I had one strong possible job and was even packing up to move when financially it wasn't going to work. I began the process of registering at Boise State University and was pretty much all setup to get my Bachelors in Applied Science, minor in Computer Science. However, I was pretty disappointed that I was going to have to complete three more math classes just to begin the computer science part and I wasn't even wanting anything really to do with computer science as I hate programming.
As time got closer to getting ready to go to BSU, I was talking things over with the wife, and I had mentioned to her about WGU and out of curiosity, we both looked at their website and discovered they had a Bachelors program and it was completely online and would give me tons of certifications as a way of completing each class. That is something that was a great interest to us as all the good schools with security programs were not in our state nor offered online classes exclusively. I began the process of finding more information the very next day and quickly was guided through the enrollment process and I took care of transferring transcripts, financial aid, VA GI bill stuff, and getting excited more every day.
I started my first day of class on Sept 1st and have a student mentor named Joyce who is an electrical engineer (Masters degree) at Lockheed. She is there to make sure I stay on track and focused.
My first class is CUV1, which is actually a CIW Web Design Specialist certification. In the first day, I did 8 chapters and took a practice exam scoring 75% easily. There was a lot of JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML questions that I had a tough time with. I did another 8 chapters and started scoring 80-84% on the practice exams. In order to "test out" of the class and take your certification exam, you need to consistently score 85% or better. I proceeded to skip the next 14 chapters which had to do with various softwares and designing websites and graphics with them, something I have no interest in. The last 4 chapters had to do with JavaScript, databases, web site maintenance practices, and a few other subjects. After completing those I did 600 questions which covered the entire book and started doing 94-97% on the practice exams.
So where does that put me? I'm on Day 11 of my first class and I take my exam tomorrow. I was scheduled to take at maximum 6 weeks to complete this class.
This is another reason why I chose this school. My pace, my time. I am a quick learner and don't need as much time to absorb information as a lot of people do. I don't meant to brag, this is just the way I was made.
I am excited to start this school and I want to do well. I want to write down about my classes in this blog to record my experience.
Oh yeah, this station on Pandora helps me drown out noises and distractions. http://t.co/vzoKHmDVh1
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