Mesa College, San Diego. First time in school in sixteen years.
I enrolled in Java, C/C++, and Systems Analysis classes at Mesa College in early 2004. This was the first time I’d been in school in sixteen years.
I was about 39. The other students in Systems Analysis were substantially younger. One of them, Erin, was pregnant and also recruiting me for a mortgage company. One of them, Marie-Pierre, had recently been in a wedding and I wasn’t sure whether she’d heard about my fashion preferences.
The Systems Analysis class was mostly things I already knew, framed in vocabulary I recognized. The Java class was more work. I was not the fastest student but I was paying attention in a way that I probably hadn’t been the first time around.
I went back because I wanted the credentials and because I’d realized that sixteen years of self-teaching had given me a practical foundation that was very wide and not always deep. There were things I did by instinct that I wanted to understand properly.
The other students were polite about the forty-year-old in the room. I was polite back. We all passed.