When starting this blog, I knew I wanted to log my time and efforts at WGU, but I hadn’t, and still have not, settled on a format. Maybe weekly, maybe at turning points, maybe whenever I feel like it? Honestly, it will most likely be the last option, but for this first post, I want to do a day-by-day breakdown of how I spent my first 6 days and passed four classes during that time!
Day 1
Okay, saying I passed four classes in 6 days is a little deceiving. I came into Day 1, Friday, August 1st, knowing which four classes I had, so I had a game plan ready. One of my four classes (D316, IT Foundations) required a CompTIA exam, so my first order of business was scheduling a call with that course instructor. Her first availability wasn’t until early afternoon, so I bided time with practice tests for the A+ 1201 exam to ensure I could still pass it after 15 years…
I met with my instructor, and she was perfectly happy to start the voucher process for me due to my professional experience and grades on the practice tests. WGU got the exam voucher to me in another couple of hours. I scheduled the exam for Wednesday, the 6th, to give myself time to cram on the detail-oriented bits like Wi-Fi standards and how to troubleshoot my natural-born enemy: multi-function printers.
The rest of term one consisted of a math gen-ed course, a Systems Thinking gen-ed course, and an Intro to IT course. C955, Applied Probability and Statistics, seemed the most daunting of the three, so I opted to tackle it first. Advanced math is not my strong point (I only got as far as trigonometry in high school, and the only thing I remember about it is some old hippie catching another hippie tripping on acid). Still, I’d read on Reddit that it was pretty reasonable, so I wasn’t too afraid.
Sure enough, entering the course material, the first 3 of 7 modules were entirely algebra review. I made sure I could do the quizzes for them, moved on to Module 4, and was greeted with standard deviations! The beast of statistics, and the first totally brand new thing I’d be learning in school! Luckily, the module consisted of a general explanation of what a standard deviation means and how to apply it to a bell curve (as opposed to how to calculate it), as well as information on when to use what graph, which was also mostly review for me. Albeit, reviewing 15ish-year-old knowledge.
I was feeling good, so I started module 5, descriptive statistics for two variables, before calling it for the night. Not the most classically exciting Friday night, but it sure was productive!
Day 2
After my early morning bike ride, I picked up where I had left off with Module 5. A lot of this module was fairly intuitive – line goes up, it’s a positive correlation, not too bad. I did get tripped up on right vs left-skewed distributions for a minute, though; my brain wanted to say the tallest part on the graph is clearly the skewed part, but that’s why we take these classes!
Module 6 was about biases in data, and once again pretty easily intuitable. I did have to do fresh learning on Simpson’s Paradox, however. Module 7 was proper probability – another subject I mostly knew, but the complex parts I’d have to relearn. Specifically, complements and how to calculate probability within probability. For example, if 40% of students are in the drama club and 20% are in the science club, what’s the likelihood that a student in the science club is also in the drama club?
I took the pre-assessment (reminder: for WGU courses that have a WGU-proctored final exam, you have to take the pre-assessment before they unlock the final) and scored well above the requirement to pass, so I went ahead and scheduled it for a couple of hours later. The pre-assessment revealed that my only real weakness was in these probability calculations, so I crammed those for a couple of hours and readied for the test.
And then I passed! Full exemplary in every category, a fantastic way to pass my first test and course at WGU. The live proctored testing process wasn’t too bad either, but I understand that that will largely depend on your proctor. I just had to show off my cleared desk, ID, and clean whiteboard, and then they left me alone.
After passing the test, I went downstairs to my “fun” computer to relax… but when you’re hot, you’re hot, so I took the pre-assessment for D322, Introduction to IT. I scored highly on the pre-assessment, but it clearly identified weak points in project management and knowing the generations of computing (i.e., 1st generation is vacuum tubes, 3rd is transistors), so I marked those down and finally allowed myself to relax for the night.
Day 3
On Sunday morning, I also went for a morning bike ride, but didn’t charge my rear derailleur. Boneheaded mistake on my part – always make sure the charging light comes on when you plug something in! Naturally, the battery died on a climb, so I got stuck in my second easiest gear about 10 miles from home. I wound up turning this into ultra-high cadence sprint drills to speed up the process. All of this is relevant to my first week at WGU because those drills destroyed my back – just imagine me wincing as I do every action described forthwith.
Due to that bike mishap, I got restarted on Intro to IT much later in the day than I had intended. When I returned to work, the course instructor emailed me an additional pre-test and suggested that if I get 90% on that, I’m solid for the real thing. So I took that test, got a good score, and scheduled the test for another hour and a half later.
Like my math test, I took that hour and a half to cram my weak points: identifying different generations of computing and the project management lifecycle. The biggest trip-up was remembering which phase resource allocation is done- charter or planning. In my brain, it’s in both. You get the whole budget during the chartering process and management buy-in, and then you plan the finer details during project planning. That may be my government experience coloring the school lesson; for exam purposes the budget allocation is in the chartering phase!
Despite the aching back and weird start to the day, I was able to pass this exam as well. Two down for term one, and two to go! Next up: D372 Introduction to Systems Thinking, and the first class of mine to utilize practical assessments instead of exams.
Systems Thinking was also the first entirely new subject to me. The course instructor had reached out with a Microsoft Sway link (first I’d ever heard of that suite) that described the three tasks that served as the practical assessments, and how best to fill them out. Combining that with knowledge gleaned from reddit, I started on the first of the tasks that evening.
I found myself enjoying the course material quite a bit; while the idea of systems thinking seems primarily business-executive oriented, I found it to be pretty applicable to a lot of systems, IT included. In short, “Systems Thinking” is a way of problem solving that looks at each part of a whole to see how they interact (balancing, reinforcing, or opposing), and how to use those interactions to get to the root.
Task 1 required examining a case study using some common and foundational systems thinking tools. Between the course module and the linked texts from https://thesystemsthinker.com/, I was able to do a decent job and submitted my first task that night. It takes up to 3 days for a task evaluation to come back, so I started reading the material for Task 2 before heading to bed.
Day 4
No bike ride on Monday, so I woke up, sipped some coffee, and started drawing the plan for task 2. This part of systems thinking introduced us to some of the archetypes of how systems interact and how those archetypes can be drawn into a diagram. The task itself was applying one of those archetypes to a case study. I felt good and submitted that one as well.
The D372 knowledge on reddit said it’s best to wait for task 1 and task 2 to be graded before doing task 3, but I felt that I gelled with this course, so I went ahead and submitted the third task as well! Assuming none of my tasks got returned, that meant I just had my A+ exam to study for to close out these first four classes.
Day 5
I finally, mostly, took a day off on Tuesday. All that was left for the term was to shore up a couple of weak points for the A+ 1201 exam and wait for my tasks to be graded. Being confident in my ability to pass the exam, I allowed myself to enjoy the new FFXIV patch for most of the day before settling down to make a study plan for the next day.
Knowing most of the A+ material from working in IT for so long, I just spent some time making Anki cards for the 802.11 Wi-Fi standards (which versions are on which bands and max throughput) and the laser printer parts. The anki cards were nice, but for Wi-Fi, I had better luck remembering the order the standards came out – sometimes telling a story is easier than remembering pure data points. I did the same thing with laser printing, remembering that the drum does this or that, while the primary corona does that other thing, was difficult, so I mentally mapped out the steps instead.
Day 6 – A+ Test Day
Checking my school email with my coffee in the morning, I learned that the first two of my Systems Thinking tasks were adjudicated favorably. This gave me some extra pep leading into my cram session for the A+ exam at 1 PM. The live proctor for this one was a lot more intense. I had to remove a lot from my area, and he had me hold the webcam up in all sorts of bizarre places to make sure I didn’t have a cheating method embedded under the desk or anything crazy.
Then the test started, 5 PBQs in a row! These “performance-based” questions aren’t much fun. I admire what they’re trying to accomplish by putting the tester in a similar position to real life, but in my opinion, they fall short. The rest of the test went as expected, except I didn’t have a single question about laser printers or Wi-Fi standards. Instead, I got a question about dot matrix printers! Go figure.
CompTIA lets you see your score as soon as you finish, and I scored an 855/900 – amazingly, this is the same score I got on the 2009 exam version! Guess I didn’t learn anything.
Shortly after I passed, I was also notified that my third task for Systems Thinking had been accepted! That’s all of the work done for my first four classes. At the time of writing (Day 7), I am waiting for WGU to receive the A+ results from CompTIA. Unfortunately, the rest of my classes are locked until my mentor opens them – I have a call with him tomorrow morning to keep moving onward and upward!
I’m not being idle, though. A look at the subsequent four courses shows I’m in pretty solid shape. A gen-ed class on the Constitution that requires a practical assessment (likely an essay), an object assessment for Network and Security (I got over 90% on the pre-assessment already), and two more outside certifications: A+ 1202 and AWS Cloud Practitioner. I already hold a more difficult AWS certification, and the second part of the A+ is even more help-desk like, so dare I say, I might complete this next batch even quicker!