Just like my 80's comedy hero Rodney Dangerfield, I've officially gone back to school. Last week was mostly introductions to courses and getting adjusted to the early class starts and such. So far the things taught in class have been a bit slow for my level of web design and programming, but the courses should pick up speed in the next few weeks. I'm pretty glad that this college program uses recent, practical technology as opposed to stuff I used in university. In some of my computer science courses at uni, I had to learn useless programming languages from the 1970's just because the 70's was when all professors stopped learning anything new and just stuck with what they knew. COBOL, Fortran, Assembler, C and Pascal ring any bells anyone? Now I'll be learning how to make practical applications with all of the .NET languages, PHP 4/5, JSP, Ajax, MySQL 5, SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g, i.e. languages/programs that companies actually use and which are on the cutting edge of web technology. University was good for studying about algorithms and theoretical programming, but I should have done a practical post-graduate course like this one right after university! Although I think if I did that, then I never would have experienced living abroad and the whole teaching thing so of course I still have no regrets ;) But the practical knowledge I'll gain and portfolio I'll build from attending 1 year of college will outweigh many other alternatives.

So for anyone considering returning to school after a lot of bumming around the world, and going for a Master's degree of something you're not sure will amount to anything, give college a look!