Howdy,
As you’ve probably surmised from the URL and from the title of this blog post, my name is Patrick. I’m an IT professional with over 10 years of experience gained the old fashioned way: starting from help desk and working my way up to my current role as a security engineer/infosec specialist (see my about page for more on me). Along the way I picked up a healthy amount of IT knowledge errata, but one thing I haven’t picked up is a degree! With the job market heating up and that old complacency feeling settling in a little too deep I figured it might be a good idea to fill that gap.
I recently heard about WGU. Ok I’ll be honest, I’d love to say that I heard about it through a colleague or deep research, but really I asked ChatGPT: “I’ve got a lot of real life experience and certifications, but no degree, what’s a good online Bachelor of Science program for me?”. It spat back out a lot of good options, but WGU, Western Governors University, really stood out.
WGU is a fully accredited competency-based university. In short, instead of earning college credits through seat time, you earn them through proving your competency in the subject matters of the classes you’re taking – usually by passing an exam or writing a paper. For the IT courses, claiming competency oftentimes means passing a certification test. I’m a current CISSP and AWS Solutions Architect (associate), and previously I’ve held A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications from CompTIA. Outside of certification land I’m pretty confident of the skills (Linux, Python, PowerShell, etc) I’ve learned over the past decade+ on the job… so this program is super attractive to me.
Some more research (the old fashioned, Google-y way this time), some phone calls with their enrollment counselors, and some emails later, I’m enrolled in WGU’s B.S. in Cloud Computing (AWS track) program! I’ll be starting on August 1st, 2025. A lot of WGU students use Sophia or Study.com to transfer credits in ahead of enrollment, but I’ll be starting from almost no credits. My AWS certification counted for one class (3 credits), and some community college courses I took way back in 2010 counted for 6 gen ed credits (English Composition and Anthropology), so that leaves a whopping 112 credits still to be earned!
I’m intending to keep this blog primarily as a record of my time studying for WGU – I won’t be doing a study session by study session or class by class breakdown, but probably a weekly or biweekly record of my progress. There are a lot of amazing resources out there made to assist people with specific WGU courses and exams, but a dearth of wholistic resources about the experience, that’s the niche I’m looking for.
At the same time, I want to keep a log of the things I learn while working on personal projects! Looking at the GitHub repos is one thing, but I’m really interested in keeping a “lessons learned” for these things, for myself and for prospective employers to get an idea of how I work! That being said, I’ve got two projects I’ve completed recently enough that I think I can cobble together entries on before I start school, so look forward to those soon.