Finishing Strong

© J. Francois Barnard – August 16, 2020

I have just completed Term 5 of 2020. And it went well in the exams, thank you for asking! In September 2020, the first term for the 2020/21 academic year will start, and that will be my last term at UoPeople. With the end in sight, I can now reflect on the previous three years and celebrate many more highlights than low points.

To put you in the picture, I started my Bachelor's in Science Business Administration (BSBA) degree in September 2017. I thought I started the previous term, having done English Composition I in term 5 of the 2016/17 academic year. I was wrong. That was to prove my English proficiency, and UoPeople never transferred its credits to my degree.

The idea is that you take two courses per term, and there are five terms per academic year. That gives you ten courses per year, and 40 courses make up the 4-year Bachelors-degree. If, however, you can maintain a grade point average above 3.5, the university will allow you to take a third course per term. That way, you can fast-track your degree and finish earlier.

Doing fifteen courses per year instead of ten adds a lot of pressure to your life, as you can imagine. I have a full-time job, a part-time business, and a family. All require a piece of me, and I give it as best I can. The support from my family is just incredible, and if it were not there, I would never have been able to study.

By now, I have completed all my major courses, and the last three courses are from UoPeople's selection of elective courses to make up the last required credits. These will be Introduction to Health Psychology, Introduction to Sociology, and Programming Fundamentals. Yes, that last one is probably the first course that Computer Science students take. The interesting thing is that I started my career as a programmer. The DOS environment I worked in will be of no help now, but the fundamentals of programming have not changed between 1987 and 2020.

A few weeks ago, I phoned an old school friend – an architect – to get information about ISO9000 and Six Sigma and the application of quality management systems (QMSs) at the research institute where he works. I told him that I needed it for my studies, and he found it difficult to believe that I would go back to study again so much later in life.

"No, I would forget everything learned in the first week by the time I reach the exam nine weeks later," he laughed. And that is probably the perception most people have.

That got me thinking. How much do I forget again?

But no, you do not forget it nine weeks later in the exam, albeit that some questions seemed to stem from a different course! The brain absorbs all information. Depositing information is not the problem; recalling it may be. But even though I cannot remember today the exact details of an assignment done in 2017, the information is still there and, when needed, presents itself again.

Over the last three years, I found that much of the course material overlapped from term to term. How many courses would cite Immanuel Kant? Or how many times would we see Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? I took Macroeconomics and Introduction to Economics in the same term, and even one assignment was precisely the same.

Repeating the same work from different angles helps cement certain concepts, helping you recall information when needed. Also, I encountered many of these concepts during my career, and the academic information obtained from UoPeople slotted those blocks of information nicely into position. Many things just made more sense to me.

But better still, I could fill assignment after assignment with first-hand experience from my career. I could apply academic theory to practical situations. I could tell my peers where I encountered certain aspects in my career and light it up from a different angle.

And that helps me recall information.

I remember events during my career, and link them to academic information learned at UoPeople, and recalling the event now helps to recall the educational information too. We are indeed "fearfully and wonderfully made!"

The last lap of this academic race is starting in the first week of September 2020. I want to finish strong. I want to keep my momentum from the previous terms and carry it over into the last one. I love studying, and studying has enriched my life in more ways than you can imagine.

Trivial information

Communication between the student and the university takes place mainly on the email platform. By now, I have received 25,500 emails from UoPeople! Most are system generated as the Moodle Server notifies me of posts made on discussion forums. The earlier you submit your discussion assignment in the week, the more notifications you receive per email.

Below are the courses in the order that I took them: