Meta AIR
I don’t think any paper about my experience in the AODC program can truly be told without mentioning the four years I spent at UM-Flint from 1999 – 2003 and how very little of that learning and experience has impacted my life and my learning. This is opposed to the year and a half I’ve spent in the AODC program that has been some of the most impactful learning and thinking I’ve done in a very long time.
So let’s start in 1999 when I was coming to UM-Flint after two years at Mott Community College and one very disastrous semester at Western Michigan University. I was struggling with depression and ADHD, but wouldn’t know that was the cause of my struggles until almost 20 years later when I was finally diagnosed as an adult and began treatment and therapy. During my first four years at UM-Flint I was an English major with a vague idea of what I really wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but wasn’t sure how that translated into the real world outside of teaching.
For a while I thought seriously about pursuing an academic career in rhetoric and composition, but all of that depended on surviving my undergraduate degree. I loved my teachers and they loved me and tried their best to help me get out of my own way. Unfortunately, on top of my undiagnosed mental health issues, I was also an obnoxiously arrogant 20 something who wanted to change the world but didn’t want to have to work very hard to do it. I ended up on academic probation a few times and then on financial aid probation a few times before it all culminated in 2003 when I walked at the spring commencement ceremonies and just needed to take two more classes after that to be finished. But my financial aid was blocked because of academic issues and I didn’t have the money on my own to pay for the classes, so I just got a job working as a newspaper reporter and decided I didn’t need a degree to be a writer and set off to make my mark in the world.
Every few years I would get the itch to finish my degree and I would pull up the audit tool too see what I needed to do to finish and would get frustrated. All of the classes I needed were in the middle of the day in person an hour away in Flint. Until the pandemic. For a major worldwide tragedy, the COVID pandemic worked out well for me in a lot of ways. First, it opened up the world of remote work to me so I could look for jobs outside of the limited Southeastern Michigan area, and second, it ushered in the world of fully online degree programs. I looked through several programs in English or creative writing, but they all involved three to four years of additional classes to finish and were ridiculously expensive.
Also, in the intervening years as I had made my way up the career ladder as a marketing copywriter and content strategist, I was less enamored with the English or creative writing degrees. Then I found the AODC. Not only was this program perfect for me as far as accelerated classes and a quick turnaround to finish my degree, the certificate programs were exactly what I needed to feel like my degree was useful in a modern world. The classes for the digital communication certificate were, for the most part, a rehash of a lot of things I had already learned, but they forced me to stop and think about why I was doing what I was doing and think about the greater context of digital communication in our current world. My business communication class, particularly, was a true surprise with the professor willing to experiment with AI and learn the hows and whys of what it did and how it could be dangerous or helpful depending on who was using it and what they were using it for. I think quote from one of the papers I did for that class sums these thoughts up nicely: “I still think generative AI tools are novelty toys more than anything else and any business that tries to use them in place of humans will find them more trouble than they’re worth after a while. But I do like this class’s aim of using the tools to see what they can tell us about how humans write in business and why that’s important.” The final paper I did for that class was one of the most challenging and rewarding pieces of writing I’ve done in my academic career or work career.
I also really enjoyed my IDS 300 class that had me thinking a lot about being a human in these modern times and how to retain my humanity as society progresses. I also thought a lot about my progress as a student from my 20s into my 40s and how much better I was able to handle school at this point in my life. This quote from my AIR for that class says it best, “This relates closely to my defining theme of this class this semester and that’s the idea that higher education is wasted on youth. I am so much more appreciative of my education know. I’m more contemplative and reflective as well. I’ve also had two decades of life experience to draw on for ideas and insights and reflection. The AODC has been a life changer not just for the speed and fully online setup, but for this class that was a great introduction to me of what being a student in my 40s can be and how education can help make me a better person, a better worker, and a better citizen.”
The only real disappointment in that certificate program was my digital marketing class. The teacher didn’t seem to have changed the material at all in more than a decade, which was so odd considering how cutting edge that field can be and how quickly things can change. So instead of having invigorating and challenging discussions and thoughts on modern issues in digital marketing, I was discussing ideas that were outdated and useless.
The other certificate program I was able to take allowed me to tap into the data and programming nerd side of my brain in a way I had been blocked from earlier in my academic career. Back in high school and my early college years, I had the idea that I wanted to study computer science and programming, but every time I tried to take a programming class I was denied because of the ridiculous math prerequisites. This was even though I had learned how to do quite a bit of programming on my own just by fooling around with it. Then came this certificate program that started me in a statistics class that allowed me to learn I actually love statistics. It was a nice parallel to the data-driven work I do with my marketing writing. From there I was able to learn Python, which was a blast, and then take a data visualization class where I used Python. It was great. It also opened up a whole new world of data science careers available to me if I ever wanted to move out of marketing.
Now as I come to the end of this essay and the end of my college career, I’m excited about what I’ve learned and feel like I’m better equipped to appreciate what I’ve learned and appreciate the opportunities out there to use it. My education is less esoteric to me now and more practical. This program not only accelerated my path to degree completion, it accelerated my maturity and depth as a learner.