I am at a crossroads with my education right now. I am loving the classes and am very proud of how well I have done. But admittedly, they go by very quickly and at times I feel like we have to skim over important topics that more time should be devoted to. That is the nature of the beast however when you are taking online classes that only last 7 weeks. Still, I do feel like I have learned a lot of the past year and a half. Most of it has been absorbed and is sitting in the back of my brain ready to be used some day.
My problem is my upcoming capstone project. In a perfect world, I would do my capstone this coming summer and be done with my courses by the summer's end. But this is far from a perfect world. I have to have my capstone in place by the end of April, I think. Maybe it's March. I need to go back and look at that. I have three different kinds of projects I can do: research, internship or service learning. I do not want to do research. It's just not my thing and it involves a lot of red tape with multiple university departments. Internship would be fun but I would have to take a leave of absence from work for 7 weeks and not exactly sure what I would live on if I did that. Service learning I could do at work, but it has to be something I'm not already involved in. That's doable if I can figure it out.
My problem is coming from having the time to find the capstone. I work full time and then come home and do homework every night. So far this year, I have not even had time to look at my capstone handbook since I first read it. There's just too much to do. And then you add trying to run a household and have some kind of life on top of that work and there's just not been a chance to look. And I don't want to settle for something less just so that I can have a capstone project in place. It's too important.
The capstone will be the only time in this degree that I will get real-time, hands-on experience with gerontology. I don't want to waste this opportunity. When I was an undergraduate, I settled for my internship experience because I wanted one that worked with elderly people. I enjoyed it but did not learn anything practical. I spent 2 semesters coaching a wii bowling league. That was it. Fun but not beneficial to my career. I do not want that to happen this time. So, if I wait until summer of '25 to do my capstone, I will have a good long time to find exactly what I want. I know that puts me back a year, but this is too important to me going forward. I want to be able to apply for jobs with some kind of gerontological skill in place. I don't get that a lot at work because I am basically a secretary. That's fine and I love what I do, it's just the facts.
I am not giving up the idea of doing my capstone this coming summer. I have just come to the decision that what I want out of this experience is more important that rushing it. We will see what I can come up with in the next few weeks. I'll update you.
That is all.
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