Haven't written in a while. I've been buried in Queens College coursework and honestly haven't had the energy to blog about it. But here's the update: I'm taking Precalculus, Calculus, and Discrete Math. Voluntarily! The kid who nearly failed three years of math at Brooklyn Tech is choosing to take more math. Wild.
And I kind of like it? I don't fully understand why. Maybe because this time it feels like it's leading somewhere specific instead of being a thing I'm forced to do.
Going back to Queens College is weird. Same campus where I got my Music Education degree, same buildings, some of the same staff at the registrar's office, but now I'm in the CS building instead of the music building. It's a trip.
I've been doing The Odin Project and FreeCodeCamp alongside my classes. The CS courses give me the theory stuff (data structures, algorithms, all the discrete math proofs) and the self-study stuff keeps me actually building things so I don't go insane from just doing problem sets.
The freelancing has been the most interesting part though! I built a scheduling system in Python for my old school that automates how they assign students to lessons. Teachers used to spend 30+ hours a year doing this by hand with spreadsheets. Now it just... works. Knowing how schools operate from the inside made it way easier to figure out what the constraints actually were. My old colleagues are using it and apparently saving a ton of time!
I also built a couple management systems in Node.js and PostgreSQL to track instruments and learning materials. My former coworkers are the beta testers, which is both cool and stressful.
The workload is genuinely insane. Full course load, freelancing, part-time job. I'm running on coffee and spite. But every time I pass an exam or ship something that works? It feels like progress. Real, measurable progress.