SNHU: Update 3
I am finished with my Master of Science degree in Information Technology from Southern New Hampshire University as of December 1, 2023. Thank goodness.
This has been a very roundabout journey. I first started seriously entertaining the idea of a master’s degree back in 2017. I was becoming eligible for my employer’s tuition reimbursement policy and I wanted to take advantage of it as quickly as possible. The longer you wait to start, the longer until you’re able to finish. I didn’t want to wait another year, two, or even longer before I got started. My uncle has a philosophy that it never gets easier, so you may as well do it now. Figured I had better get the ball rolling.
As of October 2017, I was finishing my first term. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and much less weathered than I am now. Things looked positive, and I was pretty confident about my ability to finish on schedule and with little difficulty.
Things got rocky with that employer and I went on an indefinite hiatus. Financially, we weren’t easily able to afford school without that tuition reimbursement kickback of 50% and I didn’t want to be caught in a spot where I had to cough up the full amount for school. I took a break for a single term, that turned into multiple terms, that ended up being about 4 years altogether. I knew in 2021 when I was starting my new job that I needed to start back soon or I wouldn’t finish at all.
I reached out to the admissions office of SNHU about resuming classes on April 26, 2022. They paired me up with a new academic advisor (not sure if my original advisor left the university or if it’s just standard practice that they assign you to someone new each time) and she got me signed up for IT-515 Innovation in IT starting on June 6. She even had a tentative timeline out to November 2023 when I would presumably finish my last class. Easy enough.
Classes started back and I fell into a comfortable groove pretty quickly. Terms are ten weeks long with a week gap between them. Each week or “module” typically has some assigned reading, a discussion board post, and one or more assignments to submit. The first module is always the introductory stuff. Tell your classmates about yourself, what’s your background in the subject area, all that jazz. Modules two through eight are the real meat and potatoes of the course. There’s typically some kind of overarching project that you have to do, with “milestone” submissions every few weeks to make sure you’re still on pace and get feedback from your professor. Week nine is usually the big submission; you take any criticism offered on the milestone, update the work, put it all together in a single document, and submit it for typically 30% or so of your final grade in the course. Week ten is the final discussion board post where everyone wishes each other well in their future courses and endeavors. It’s pretty formulaic.
One of the things I really like about the SNHU system is how every course is worth 1000 total points. Every single assignment and its value is visible from the very beginning of the class. Discussion board posts are typically 10 to 20 points each, papers and projects are 50 to 100, milestones tend to be 100 to 200, and the final submission is usually around 300 points. If you have 180 of 200 available points, you have a 90 average. Super clear, and it really helps to know how much an assignment is worth to know how much I need to stress about it.
Most of the courses were pretty straightforward, and not particularly easy or difficult. Innovation in IT consisted of taking some new concept in technology and mocking out how it might be marketed and used in the industry. IT Project/Team Management was basically just a crash course in how to use Microsoft Project. Those were basically the master’s equivalent of gen ed courses.
Telecommunications/Networking was my kryptonite. I knew it would be. I hate networking and I’m terrible at it. There was a sort of digital platform that contained the textbook, some visual examples, and the assessments for the content. Interesting note, this was the only class in the entire program that contained traditional quizzes and tests. Normally, I prefer papers and projects. With this class, I was glad to have the quizzes and tests. All I’m saying is that Quizlet is amazing and I do not deserve any of the points I got on those assessments. I still don’t really know what a subnet is, how a patch cable differs from whatever the alternative is, or how to find my IP address. Please do not call on me for networking jobs; I do not understand it and I’m content with just assuming that it is magic.
Mobile Application Development was fun. I overestimated my familiarity with Android development from the Android course I took back during my undergrad, but the mobile development landscape has changed substantially since then. Traditional Android development involved a lot of UI design with XML formatting. Fortunately, Jetpack Compose works a lot like Flutter with nesting design elements in a more human-readable context. The actual lessons were only marginally helpful, but YouTube has some fantastic tutorials on the platform. I’m personally terrible at designing a pleasant and intuitive UI, but the app worked. Maybe someday I’ll go back and improve it.
Distributed Application Development reintroduced me to Java. My undergrad mostly used just standard terminal applications with default Java. This class used Spring Boot, which is a more full-featured Java framework. It took me a while to figure out where code changes actually go in Spring Boot, but it wasn’t bad once I understood what I was supposed to be doing. We had a lot going on during that class, so I spent a lot of Saturdays and Sundays working late into the evening, and there were quite a few submissions within minutes of the midnight deadline. All in all, the material wasn’t difficult, but I didn’t spend nearly enough prep time on the front end to get ready for the work.
Principles of Database Design wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but it was helpful nonetheless. What I wanted was more along the lines of how SQL is optimized under the hood, and how queries and functions interact with the data. Instead, this was more of an exercise in how to translate business requirements into a data schema and represent that with a UML diagram. That’s still valuable, potentially even more so if I eventually work in more of an architect role, which is my goal. In either case, it was nice to get some more practical database experience. We don’t have a DBA at work, so all of the engineers share that responsibility. I’m not going to turn down some additional training that will make me better at my day to day duties.
Capstone in Information Technology humbled me some, but I was also getting some serious senior-itis. The cool thing about this course was that you pretty much came up with some real world problem that could be solved by a new technology project, and you effectively planned it out and executed it as much as possible. Fortunately, I already had a pretty good idea of a project that would help blood bank lab technicians more easily cross check blood donations with potential recipients. Unfortunately, I didn’t have near as much of a grasp on the process as I thought I did. The actual project that I created (originally supposed to be React, ended up using Spring Boot again) was a very pared down version of my original plan. The professor was cool, though, and basically all it mattered was that you had a fleshed out idea and a tentative plan for creating it. I had enough to make a small demo project and create a few artifacts to submit, and that was adequate for the class.
The real kicker at the end was that my wife was starting her master’s in Literacy at the same time that I was doing my capstone class. So we were both working, we were both in school, and then we were doing all the crap that we have to do already with the kids. Soccer practice, soccer games, weekend entertainment, all kinds of stuff. I didn’t want to postpone my class any more, especially since I was already close to finishing, and she didn’t have any flexibility on when to start since it was a cohort program sponsored by her employer. The situation wasn’t ideal, but we’re of the opinion that you can pretty much put up with anything for a few months. There weren’t any hard scheduling conflicts, just a whole lot of work and not enough time to complete it all comfortably.
It was a rough month or two, but we made it. I finished, she’s almost done with her first class (as of writing this), and our afternoons have a lot less going on. Having both of us in school at the same time is kinda garbage, so I’m not going straight back for another degree, but my plan is to get a MS in Computer Science from Clemson as my next degree, and then follow that up with a PhD in Computer Science also from Clemson. I might start that around fall 2026, but that’s just floating around as a theory for now.
I published my final paper of the capstone class as a post a few weeks ago, but I’ll echo that sentiment here. Throughout this degree program, I’ve learned a lot. Both with school and in my personal life, I went through a lot of growth in not a lot of time. I would say I’m not the same person that I was when I started this degree. I got laid off from a job, I got a new job, I changed jobs a couple times, we lived in a camper, we built a house. We’ve weathered a lot of stuff as a family, and I think we’re stronger because of it. I learned a lot about information technology, but I also learned a lot about life. It’s been interesting, but I’m also glad to see the end of that chapter. We’ll see what the next chapter in my life holds.
One thing I don’t want to do is get stale now. School forced me to at least be cognizant of current trends in computer science and information technology. Now that I don’t have anything actively driving me to discover more, it would be easy to just get lazy and forget about tech outside my day job. I did participate in the Carolina Code Cast, which was really cool, but I want to keep that sort of momentum. If you make any sort of effort to look, you can find tons of conferences and platforms to talk code. I want to get more plugged into those. That seems like a really accessible way to keep my skills fresh, keep me abreast to current trends in the industry, and get my name out there in the upstate South Carolina coding community. Besides that, I want to dig into more technical topics here at Words on Wednesday to just sort of muse on things. Maybe eventually that turns into a regular series or branches out into its own blog, maybe it fades with time. I just don’t want to let myself stagnate the way I did earlier in my career, and keeping up with modern tech seems like the best way to avoid it.
This has been a very roundabout journey. I first started seriously entertaining the idea of a master’s degree back in 2017. I was becoming eligible for my employer’s tuition reimbursement policy and I wanted to take advantage of it as quickly as possible. The longer you wait to start, the longer until you’re able to finish. I didn’t want to wait another year, two, or even longer before I got started. My uncle has a philosophy that it never gets easier, so you may as well do it now. Figured I had better get the ball rolling.
As of October 2017, I was finishing my first term. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and much less weathered than I am now. Things looked positive, and I was pretty confident about my ability to finish on schedule and with little difficulty.
Things got rocky with that employer and I went on an indefinite hiatus. Financially, we weren’t easily able to afford school without that tuition reimbursement kickback of 50% and I didn’t want to be caught in a spot where I had to cough up the full amount for school. I took a break for a single term, that turned into multiple terms, that ended up being about 4 years altogether. I knew in 2021 when I was starting my new job that I needed to start back soon or I wouldn’t finish at all.
I reached out to the admissions office of SNHU about resuming classes on April 26, 2022. They paired me up with a new academic advisor (not sure if my original advisor left the university or if it’s just standard practice that they assign you to someone new each time) and she got me signed up for IT-515 Innovation in IT starting on June 6. She even had a tentative timeline out to November 2023 when I would presumably finish my last class. Easy enough.
Classes started back and I fell into a comfortable groove pretty quickly. Terms are ten weeks long with a week gap between them. Each week or “module” typically has some assigned reading, a discussion board post, and one or more assignments to submit. The first module is always the introductory stuff. Tell your classmates about yourself, what’s your background in the subject area, all that jazz. Modules two through eight are the real meat and potatoes of the course. There’s typically some kind of overarching project that you have to do, with “milestone” submissions every few weeks to make sure you’re still on pace and get feedback from your professor. Week nine is usually the big submission; you take any criticism offered on the milestone, update the work, put it all together in a single document, and submit it for typically 30% or so of your final grade in the course. Week ten is the final discussion board post where everyone wishes each other well in their future courses and endeavors. It’s pretty formulaic.
One of the things I really like about the SNHU system is how every course is worth 1000 total points. Every single assignment and its value is visible from the very beginning of the class. Discussion board posts are typically 10 to 20 points each, papers and projects are 50 to 100, milestones tend to be 100 to 200, and the final submission is usually around 300 points. If you have 180 of 200 available points, you have a 90 average. Super clear, and it really helps to know how much an assignment is worth to know how much I need to stress about it.
Most of the courses were pretty straightforward, and not particularly easy or difficult. Innovation in IT consisted of taking some new concept in technology and mocking out how it might be marketed and used in the industry. IT Project/Team Management was basically just a crash course in how to use Microsoft Project. Those were basically the master’s equivalent of gen ed courses.
Telecommunications/Networking was my kryptonite. I knew it would be. I hate networking and I’m terrible at it. There was a sort of digital platform that contained the textbook, some visual examples, and the assessments for the content. Interesting note, this was the only class in the entire program that contained traditional quizzes and tests. Normally, I prefer papers and projects. With this class, I was glad to have the quizzes and tests. All I’m saying is that Quizlet is amazing and I do not deserve any of the points I got on those assessments. I still don’t really know what a subnet is, how a patch cable differs from whatever the alternative is, or how to find my IP address. Please do not call on me for networking jobs; I do not understand it and I’m content with just assuming that it is magic.
Mobile Application Development was fun. I overestimated my familiarity with Android development from the Android course I took back during my undergrad, but the mobile development landscape has changed substantially since then. Traditional Android development involved a lot of UI design with XML formatting. Fortunately, Jetpack Compose works a lot like Flutter with nesting design elements in a more human-readable context. The actual lessons were only marginally helpful, but YouTube has some fantastic tutorials on the platform. I’m personally terrible at designing a pleasant and intuitive UI, but the app worked. Maybe someday I’ll go back and improve it.
Distributed Application Development reintroduced me to Java. My undergrad mostly used just standard terminal applications with default Java. This class used Spring Boot, which is a more full-featured Java framework. It took me a while to figure out where code changes actually go in Spring Boot, but it wasn’t bad once I understood what I was supposed to be doing. We had a lot going on during that class, so I spent a lot of Saturdays and Sundays working late into the evening, and there were quite a few submissions within minutes of the midnight deadline. All in all, the material wasn’t difficult, but I didn’t spend nearly enough prep time on the front end to get ready for the work.
Principles of Database Design wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but it was helpful nonetheless. What I wanted was more along the lines of how SQL is optimized under the hood, and how queries and functions interact with the data. Instead, this was more of an exercise in how to translate business requirements into a data schema and represent that with a UML diagram. That’s still valuable, potentially even more so if I eventually work in more of an architect role, which is my goal. In either case, it was nice to get some more practical database experience. We don’t have a DBA at work, so all of the engineers share that responsibility. I’m not going to turn down some additional training that will make me better at my day to day duties.
Capstone in Information Technology humbled me some, but I was also getting some serious senior-itis. The cool thing about this course was that you pretty much came up with some real world problem that could be solved by a new technology project, and you effectively planned it out and executed it as much as possible. Fortunately, I already had a pretty good idea of a project that would help blood bank lab technicians more easily cross check blood donations with potential recipients. Unfortunately, I didn’t have near as much of a grasp on the process as I thought I did. The actual project that I created (originally supposed to be React, ended up using Spring Boot again) was a very pared down version of my original plan. The professor was cool, though, and basically all it mattered was that you had a fleshed out idea and a tentative plan for creating it. I had enough to make a small demo project and create a few artifacts to submit, and that was adequate for the class.
The real kicker at the end was that my wife was starting her master’s in Literacy at the same time that I was doing my capstone class. So we were both working, we were both in school, and then we were doing all the crap that we have to do already with the kids. Soccer practice, soccer games, weekend entertainment, all kinds of stuff. I didn’t want to postpone my class any more, especially since I was already close to finishing, and she didn’t have any flexibility on when to start since it was a cohort program sponsored by her employer. The situation wasn’t ideal, but we’re of the opinion that you can pretty much put up with anything for a few months. There weren’t any hard scheduling conflicts, just a whole lot of work and not enough time to complete it all comfortably.
It was a rough month or two, but we made it. I finished, she’s almost done with her first class (as of writing this), and our afternoons have a lot less going on. Having both of us in school at the same time is kinda garbage, so I’m not going straight back for another degree, but my plan is to get a MS in Computer Science from Clemson as my next degree, and then follow that up with a PhD in Computer Science also from Clemson. I might start that around fall 2026, but that’s just floating around as a theory for now.
I published my final paper of the capstone class as a post a few weeks ago, but I’ll echo that sentiment here. Throughout this degree program, I’ve learned a lot. Both with school and in my personal life, I went through a lot of growth in not a lot of time. I would say I’m not the same person that I was when I started this degree. I got laid off from a job, I got a new job, I changed jobs a couple times, we lived in a camper, we built a house. We’ve weathered a lot of stuff as a family, and I think we’re stronger because of it. I learned a lot about information technology, but I also learned a lot about life. It’s been interesting, but I’m also glad to see the end of that chapter. We’ll see what the next chapter in my life holds.
One thing I don’t want to do is get stale now. School forced me to at least be cognizant of current trends in computer science and information technology. Now that I don’t have anything actively driving me to discover more, it would be easy to just get lazy and forget about tech outside my day job. I did participate in the Carolina Code Cast, which was really cool, but I want to keep that sort of momentum. If you make any sort of effort to look, you can find tons of conferences and platforms to talk code. I want to get more plugged into those. That seems like a really accessible way to keep my skills fresh, keep me abreast to current trends in the industry, and get my name out there in the upstate South Carolina coding community. Besides that, I want to dig into more technical topics here at Words on Wednesday to just sort of muse on things. Maybe eventually that turns into a regular series or branches out into its own blog, maybe it fades with time. I just don’t want to let myself stagnate the way I did earlier in my career, and keeping up with modern tech seems like the best way to avoid it.
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