Learning and More (Learning)
I am a couple weeks from finishing my first course in this web development certificate program and now it’s time for me to make the big decision about whether to officially enroll in the program. There are three other courses in the program, all of which are also available a la carte. If I’m going to enroll, I take all three remaining classes. If I’m not going to enroll, I just pick and choose from the a la carte menu. Two of the three will be extremely useful, I can already tell that, but the fourth is SQL and I’m unsure whether I will learn anything from that class at all.
I’ve been using SQL on a daily basis for a year now and at this point I’d call myself a pretty advanced user. I can type out complicated queries pretty much as fast as I can type in English. I’d really hate to spend the money on the course if it’s not going to be useful (and these courses are not cheap), but at the same time I kinda didn’t think I’d learn much from this first course (I mean, if you know one HTML tag, don’t you know them all?) but I’ve learned a huge amount and it’s been very awesome. Then again, when I started this course I truly did not know HTML and CSS and many other things about markup languages and website development, while I can only think of a few very advanced SQL features with which I am unfamiliar.
I suppose I’ll probably do it, probably take the class. I mean, without it I can’t get the certificate and while I really don’t care so much about the certificate itself, that in combination with the fact there’s always the chance that I might actually learn some new SQL stuff is enough to tip me over the edge and hand over my credit card.
My current course, though, has been awesome (as I mentioned). I would say that the course itself is a little less stellar than I would have expected and I pity the folks who came into the program with no web experience because I cannot imagine they are anything other than completely lost, but for me, for anyone who’s highly motivated to learn and happy to go above and beyond to do so, the course provides a huge amount of useful information.
Of course, it’s also immensely useful to be able to go to work every day and put what I’m learning to use. Just within the past week I helped our programmer with an HTML problem, I identified some malicious CSS in our external wiki, and I created some inline styles on a form I was creating that made the form so much clearer and easier to use. I could not have done any of that before this course.
The other day when I was installing WordPress I realized with a shock that there is no part of my WordPress installation that I don’t have the skill to change. I can modify the PHP, I can modify the CSS, I can modify the mySQL database and I have every intention of modifying them all. I was configuring my .htaccess file and I realized that I am an advanced user now. There probably aren’t too many people who use WordPress who even know they have an .htaccess file, much less know what they can do with it. It really blows my mind that I have come so far in a year. Me! A year ago I merely longed for this knowledge. It’s tickles me endlessly every time I take a break and look around and find myself in this crazy place. And it still gets better every day.
All of this makes me think about more schooling though. Seeing how much I’ve learned via one course in a certificate program and seeing how that learning has helped me learn even more on my job makes me wonder whether I should consider going back to school in a more formal fashion. My savings account immediately starts screaming in terror at the thought (and I can’t bear the thought of a higher student loan payment) but at the same time I seem to have a voracious appetite for more, more, more (education, that is).
August 26th, 2008 at 9:56 am
What’s really cool about this is that you’ve become the “person you admire” (career-wise at least).
I remember back when you said you were really impressed by people who can program and do all sorts of techie stuff.
Wow. You’re such an inspiration!