Daily Report: Deplanned

I ordered a copy of my old college transcript so that I could see exactly where my historical GPA stands. In summary, I did one year of community college immediately after my time in the Navy and completed 34 transfer credits (no GPA attached); then I went to state college and did another 141 credits in 4 years. I maintained a nice B+ 3.3 grade point average until starting the final year, when I simply came a cropper and my GPA bombed down to 2.8.

What does this mean now for going to the Radiography program here in Florida? Well, the radiography program director told me that the general cutoff GPA for accepted applications is around 3.0. In order to raise my GPA from 2.8 to 3.0, I would need to get straight A's in 26 credits of courses. If I want to apply for the Radiography program in next January's enrollment, those 26 credits would need to be completed by December 31 of this year: over the next 2 semesters. (Unfortunately, as a still-out-of-state resident, I would be paying $350 per credit hour to the college instead of the locals' $100.)

So the upshot is: I would be spending over $9000 on classes, while getting nothing but A's, placing myself only right at the cutoff point (with many other applicants) of being accepted — in other words, having only a chance of being accepted — into the radiography program. Failure to get into the program would mean waiting an entire year (until January of 2013) to apply again (presumably having taken more credits to improve my total GPA to a less-risky distance from the cutoff point), in which case I wouldn't complete the program until June of 2015.

The way I see it, at my age if a college doesn't say, "Come in and sit down; let's get started today," then I just can't get that excited about doing some studies. I'm not going to spend a year or more — and all that money — taking all the prerequisite classes for a course of study into which there is a good chance I wouldn't be accepted. It's a shame too: I would have kicked ass on that curriculum and graduated at the top of my class. Their loss.

Well: I am going to stop by the college on Monday to talk to a guidance counselor about applying some "statute of limitations" to my old college records. As I said before: one shitty spate of grades in senior-level college economic courses taken 20 years ago should not in any reasonable mind be a vitiating factor for entry into a radiography course today;

But I fully expect they will tell me it is.

(Another option is to look at other colleges' radiography programs that might either cut me a break or have less competitive — and more sensible — entry requirements. That will be another blog post, perhaps.)