A Quick Life Update
I’ve been a bit quiet recently. My goal with WL, in earnest, was to have about 1-2 posts here and about the same amount of Youtube videos per month. Obviously that’s not happening, but I assure you it’s not been for lack of motivation (or content ideas, of which my list keeps growing…).
So what gives?
Well, like a lot of people, many things in my life changed because of COVID-19. I was laid off (from a job which I had honestly been getting burnt out on anyway), and that’s partly why Will’s Lab exists. I’d been saving up a rainy day fund so that, if the need ever arose, I’d be able to leave my job and be alright for a while searching for a new one. When COVID happened, I decided to take the layoff in stride, and take a year to myself to rethink my career and life goals. I turned an empty storage building that I inherited from a late family member into my lab, and I created this website with the hopes of growing it into a wealth of knowledge to benefit fellow makers on the internet, and maybe even becoming a business someday.
But wait… It’s been more than a year since the pandemic started. Now what?
Indeed it has, and pragmatically there’s no short end to this pandemic in sight. For the moment, I’ll resist my urge to dive into politics, but I reckon I’ve got more time yet to keep re-focusing my career while the economy’s down.
So I decided to go back to college. I’ve been through once, and received an associate in applied science degree a few years ago. And even then, I knew I would want to return someday for more. Well, that day’s come, and now I’m returning first to community college for two years, and then I’ll be transferring to a university to get my bachelor’s degree.
This works out best for me because I’ll be able to stay closer to home for just a bit longer, and I’ll save a shitload of money by doing the first two years of my 4-year degree at a community college rather than going to a university all four.
There’s also the learning environment benefit of general-ed classes being in a room with 15-30 people where you can actually get to know your classmates and instructors, rather than taking your gen-ed classes in a lecture hall surrounded by 100+ strangers and a professor who, frankly, isn’t even going to try to learn his student’s names. Despite its detractors, community college has a lot of perks.
The crazy thing is how this entire process is going to work for me specifically. Because of how community college transfer agreements work with universities in my state, I’ll benefit from “doubling up”—doing two degree programs simultaneously—in community college now. That’ll give me the best prospects of transferring into a university bachelor program when I’m done. Especially considering how competitive engineering programs are these days.
That means, assuming all goes well, I’ll actually be graduating from community college with two more associate’s degrees (an associate of science, and an associate of engineering). It sounds daunting at first, but really, it only means adding about 10 credit hours to my total class plan. And I’m already down about 10 credits, because I’ll be able to skip some classes since I took them when I did my first associate’s degree. In all, I’ll be following the two associate degree programs, as well as following along with the transfer program for my 4-year school, meaning I have to juggle a lot of unique class requirements (most of which overlap). It’ll be hectic, I’ll probably be taking plenty of classes at odd hours and online, but I think it’s doable. I’ll just be really busy for the next two years of my life.
After that, well, who knows?
If the money finds its way to me, I might go on to work on my master’s degree. If not, I might try to enter the field of electronics or computer engineering, or I may even join the military in an officer program. Though I may not look like a JROTC brat anymore, I did four years of it in high school and back then was planning to join the USAF as an officer someday, and maybe even make a career out of it. I’ve always been drawn to service and leadership, and a lot of my friends are current and prior military. As far as engineering goes, the Navy, Air force, and now Space force are certainly where the best work is to be found, and within those three, the officer track is the place to be. So regardless of whether I still want to join, I’d need my bachelor’s degree before I could qualify. As a highschooler, I really did want to join the military, for a lot of reasons, but now? Well, I’d be lying if I didn’t say with age comes a lot of second-guessing.
But those are all decisions I’ve got plenty of time to think on. For now, I want to talk more about what this all means about the future of the lab.
And really, it doesn’t mean much. I’ll still be here, and I’ll still try to get new content out on a somewhat regular basis. I know how much it sucks to follow a creator who doesn’t seem to keep any sort of schedule and gets lazy about uploading anything at all. And I don’t want to be that guy. For now, keeping up (and ahead) in my classes is my top priority. But outside of that, my hobbies are still very much the same, and I’ll still find some time to share them here whenever I’m doing interesting stuff.
As an aside, I have to admit the lab has been a really sweet study space and office for doing classwork (the bench is a beautiful backdrop for video calls as well). I might do a piece about that going over some of my ergonomic tips and tricks later…