My First Week At WGU (Western Governors University), Coffee, And Channel Updates

Key Takeaways

and just intro courses so of course i i don't even look at the coursework material i just go straight to the pre-assessments hey do i have enough experience with this i passed them well i guess i had enough experience so then i take the final exams and i move on uh four days into my degree program i've already completed 16 units at this [Music] university [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] so so i love these ember mugs by the way they keep your coffee or tea or whatever drink you want at a temperature that you specify so i pretty much get to have my coffee at 120 degrees all day it never gets cold so i love it i'm not sponsored or anything i just think they're awesome welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and on this channel we talk about all things programming tech and data analytics today we're going to talk a little bit about my university western governors university and do a little house cleaning for the channel so i recently just started my bachelor's degree program in data analytics and data management at western governors university western governors is a university that is completely online and it's self-paced and competency based so i live in california but the university is actually located in utah but that's mostly just for their staff so what this type of coursework means is that say i have industry experience in data analytics which i do so if i have a lot of experience with say spreadsheets and there's a class on spreadsheets then all i have to do is take a pre-assessment exam saying hey what is your current skill level in this you know subject matter if you have a high skill level then you probably don't need to learn this basic material so you take the pre-assessment and if you pass it then you can go directly straight to the final exam and you know they have online proctoring so you have a webcam on you and they won't do screen capture and so they they test you under testing conditions but you take the exam and if you pass the class then you pass the class i really like this type of model for curriculum because if you already know something why do you have to go through the basics all over again and spend a large amount of money through student loans or through out of pocket just to reiterate on the exact same basics that you already know because like in my instance i have industry experience another great facet of this is that it's also self-paced so competency based means i can test out of classes immediately self-paced means i don't have to wait for a brand new term every few months before i can take on new coursework and get through my degree program i can say hey i passed all these classes i'm ready to take on some more right now so in that way you can easily front load a lot of your easy stuff in the beginning of your program and just knock out all of these classes and get straight into like the meat of your degree that you actually need to learn for instance there's actually a lot of basic classes that i've taken so far in my program like intro to it the basics of programming and scripting spreadsheets like i have a lot of experience in these types of things and they're lower level they're like the basics and just intro courses so of course i i don't even look at the coursework material i just go straight to the pre-assessments hey do i have enough experience with this i passed them well i guess i had enough experience so then i take the final exams and i move on four days into my degree program i've already completed 16 units at this university and i still have a long way to go and some of these other classes are basically comp tia certifications to pass the classes so those will actually require a lot of work but at least like some of this lower level stuff even though it is at the bachelor's degree level it's it goes pretty quickly so overall i'm actually feeling pretty confident about this program i really like the coursework the faculty are really supportive there's a lot of resources just a shameless plug for them i really am enjoying the whole process so far they make it really easy just to do the work to keep you on track to keep you on schedule provide you the resources and it's been an overall great experience so far so where am i taking all this so i already work in the field of data analytics i work as a research analyst for a state agency here in california and i'm getting this degree partly just because i want to because i think it's fun and it's formal education in the field that i'm already in i'm pretty much self-taught in just about everything that i do and i wanted to also see like how far my knowledge has gotten me and get a little bit more formal training because in the government circles people tend to respect those degree papers a little bit more than just i can do the job here's my experience so that was also partly something i was considering so i intend to use this degree to you know further my career expand my knowledge and also get more experience in higher levels of academia i do want to get up to maybe even a master's i don't know if phd is ever gonna that's just so far out of my line of sight right now but i want to try try to aim for a master's degree which they do have a master's degree program at western governors in data analytics so a little house cleaning for the channel i am gearing this channel a little bit more towards data science data analytics programming around those things i'll be moving some of the content towards that direction i was doing a lot of like linux and command line utility stuff i'll still do those types of things but i'm going to be posting more probably more content on data science r and things around that of that nature i have a video coming out soon on some of my favorite academic resources such as like citation managers orcid ids and useful resources for academics to use for you know their research papers managing that stuff and just things to get your research out there so given that i am back in school i still work full time i run my own business i have my leather working business i have you know this channel to run now uh and several other things that i have to take care of i don't have the time to you know be posting every day or multiple times i'm probably just going to say you know the schedule for now is probably expect a video every monday and i'm going to try and just make these videos better quality but also try to keep a consistent schedule of hey monday morning you're gonna get a new video so that's what i'm gonna be trying to aim for in the interim until you know some things settle down or you know i flash through my degree in a couple days which i don't expect to happen anytime soon so because i'm only going to be posting once a week you're not going to see as much content from me coming out on youtube but uh the link to my discord servers in the description below i pretty much lurk on there 24 7. so if you want to like hang out with some of the people and what we talk about in there talk about all kinds of stuff academics graph cat pictures memes whatever so we have a fun time if you guys want to jump into the discord server and hang out feel free the link's in the description and yeah so before i go a quick shout out to my patrons thank you devon alberto and klaus for subscribing to patreon and supporting the channel and i'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] you