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Dickinson College

I matriculated at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania) on January 20, 1996, and I'm still not sure what in the hell I was thinking when I did that. I was easily impressed by the history of the school when I began learning about it, and even more so when I saw the campus. I completely fell in love with it. I think if I had been a traditional student, I would've had the guidance around me to realize the cost of the school and how downright ridiculous it was. My first year at Dickinson was $28,000 plus books. It's now up to almost $40,000 per year.

I was very involved at the College, serving as the Chief Justice of the Student Senate for two of my three years, and as a resident adviser for two years as well. I was the assistant to the webmaster, producing much of what still exists as the departmental pages on their website, as well as teaching HTML to the Dickinson community as the director of The Web Company, an entity owned by the College.

I spent my next to last summer in Cameroon attending an anthropological field school. Four student went with an anthropology professor. I performed a comparative study between western medicine in Cameroon's northwest province and that in the southeast United States. We had a wonderful time over there, and regularly found time to play tourist on the weekends when we weren't conducting interviews or performing observational research.

In the end, I came to hate the school itself, and especially the students that were there. While I developed some very close and long-term friendships, I also realized that the majority of the population were children that were only there for a party with a $30,000/year cover charge. By my third year, I was miserable, depressed, and completely unorganized.

Engineering Degree

For the past couple of years, I've taken classes that interest me at Florida Community College at Jacksonville, the local community college. I've taken classes ranging from from medical terminology to Java and Visual Basic .NET Programming. I thought that at some point, I may go through the Surgical Technologist certification, but I deferred the program in 2003 to take a job that I've been with since.

It's hard to take classes when you work fulltime (I work about 50-55 hours per week) and especially when your schedule flucuates to handle emergencies or travel on business. I'm now managing to take classes (mostly in the evening) on a part-time basis to get a degree in either mechanical, civil, or industrial engineering.

Given the line of work I'm in these days, it's most likely to be industrial engineering, which, unfortunately, is probably the one that interests me the least of the three.