The Journey to My Undergrad Degree was Rewarding in the End

Watch me now!

I get into conversations with different people and have to wonder: my life is what it is, I cannot change the past, but I wonder how much different of a person I would be if I had an easier life. I hear stories of people who lived a much more “normal” version of life than I did – average childhood, video games, high school dances and graduation, college, career, marriage, retirement – and I wonder who I would be if I was average growing up?

I guess it’s the age I am that people in my group love to tell stories of things that shaped their lives when they were young. For me, more often than not, I remember the years of angst more than the good times.

I guess I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the years of hardship, but one has to wonder if I would have been better if things had come easier for me. This reminds me of the stories of my life that shaped my psyche and led to the existence I have now.

This is one such story.

The quest for my undergraduate degree started in 1998 when I got my associate degree and dropped out of college. At the time, I was working 80 hours a week as a Taco Bell manager and going to school full-time, before there was an online option.

My multimedia degree was worthless because I wasn’t a good enough artist to be a 3D animator, so I taught myself how to build websites and never looked back. I went from Taco Bell to tech support, to an entry-level web designer, to the lead developer in a start-up, to the manager of the interface design group for a huge company. All that happened in two years because I had a dream to get out of fast food and into tech.

By the time 2000 turned over, and people were scared that computers would suddenly stop working, I was making $120K a year in a respected position, traveling all over and meeting with high-powered people. I was even responsible for getting a huge contract with the US Postal Service because I designed and built an entire website that would run on my laptop in a weekend — and when I presented it to them, they were blown away.

The champagne in first class on the way back was exquisite.

But 9/11 happened and the Postal Service suddenly became more interested in mail safety than changing addresses. I got hit in the second round of layoffs and was never able to find anything near that amount of money again. I was a man with no undergrad degree, but plenty of experience, and fresh faces were coming out of college with better resumes than me.

I left Boston in shame and headed back to Tucson, broke, jobless, and homeless. The next twenty years would see me doing odd jobs, getting divorced, and taking up freelancing to make ends meet.

In 2011 I moved to the Philippines and married again, carrying with me a beat-up suitcase and a whole lot of emotional baggage.

In 2015, I enrolled in Ashford University, in the online program and soon got into the honors college. But life and all that baggage got in the way, and I left. It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I enrolled in SNHU and stayed there until my heart attack in 2022. After a full recovery, I enrolled for a final time.

Now, it’s 2023 and I just graduated with a General Studies degree. I still haven’t decided if I will get that graduate degree. I would like to work and travel a few years and enjoy life at 55. I ended up graduating Summa Cum Laude, so I can truly say I put my hardest effort into getting this degree.

The journey has been long and full of bumps, but it’s my journey.

The next ten years will see me traveling as an English teacher. Sure, I could probably do something that would see more money in my account, but I doubt I could get the satisfaction of guiding young lives and helping others. I am also going to start helping writers build creative businesses around their books and writing careers. I love writers because I am one, and I can’t think of a group of people more deserving of my attention and care.

My family is the most important thing to me now, but a close second will be the satisfaction of doing something important with all the experience I have built up throughout my life.

Getting my degree gave me that opportunity and all the hardship it took to get it was well worth it in the end.