Last night’s post was in reference to the fact that I signed up for classes last night! 

For those of you who are somewhat new, I have an Associate’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from the community college that I went to in Baltimore. I took a year off after finishing it with the intentions of going to Towson University, and then about a year into my hiatus moved to Colorado. The move to Colorado was not very planned out. We visited in May 2011 and moved in November 2011. I then waited the required year to apply for in-state tuition, then completed my first semester in college since December of 2010 a few short weeks ago.

I went to community college here too, last semester, because I wasn’t accepted to CU Denver until the spring of this year, and they only accepted half of my credits that I took in Baltimore. So the thing was, I could do another semester at community college here in Colorado (only one, and then I would have 60 credits which is the maximum to transfer) or go straight to CU in the fall.

I was waiting on FRCC and CU to decide my financial aid awards and then I was going to make a decision between the two, but last night I decided that it doesn’t matter who gives me more money because I have to go to college regardless, and the government has already agreed to let me have up to $10,000 a semester in federal subsidized loans, so whatever isn’t covered by financial aid is just going to be loans. I’ve made it through 2 and a half years of college (with winter and summer semesters too) with only $1,500 in loans so the chances I can get out with less than 10k in debt are good, so it’s something I’m willing to do.

I’ve been struggling with this for a long time and putting off signing up for classes because I’m still not 100% sure how I’m going to do this again. I’ve signed up for all online classes again because I live pretty far from the school (not really even so much in distance, but in traffic it takes 45-60 minutes to get there) and commuting there is not really an option right now because I just renewed my lease. I’m scared because I took 15 credits (5 classes) last semester and worked well over full-time and ended up hospitalized for exhaustion/stress/etc (flash back to 2010 when I took 19 credits and planned a wedding and worked two jobs with a full-day Friday internship in a Kindergarten classroom and the same exact thing happened) so I’m just hoping that I can make it through this next semester without visiting a hospital or needing an IV of Xanax. This semester is going to be harder - I’m going to be at a university and not a community college so the classes are going to be harder and the grading is going to be harder and the fact that I have to figure out how to use a new blackboard online class thing is making me want to cry a little bit.

But if I can do this without dying, during the next few months of fall semester is when I will apply to the actual teaching program (I am just admitted to the school right now but not the actual teaching program) and if I’m accepted then I will be moving to Denver and quitting my job and going to school on campus and all that, so I just have to get through the next 6 months with my sanity intact and save up a bunch of money and pay off my debt. Then Spring 2014 I will officially be a junior at CU and hopefully starting the teaching program and will only have 2 years left until I can be a teacher.

The classes I signed up for are:

• FINE 1001 - Art History
• ESTS 2000 - Intro to Ethnic Studies
• GEOG 1202 - Physical Geography 
• HIST 3601 - History of Colorado (MY FIRST 300 LEVEL CLASS :’))
• PSYC 1005 - Psych 2

Can I do it? Maybe not, but it’s worth a shot! Stay tuned.