Well, it's been three and a half long years, but I've finally got my associates to show for it. I've achieved an Associates of Arts in Mathematics with a 4.0 and Highest Distinction from Paradise Valley Community College. I figure now would be a good time to reflect on my experiences in community college now that I've completed all of my education there and am destined for university next fall.
First of all, the fancy stuff after my degree. "With Highest Distinction" is achieved by having an honors graduation and getting a 3.9 GPA or higher. That means that you need to complete 15 honors credits out of your 60 required credits for an associates, while also maintaining effectively a perfect GPA. If I received even a single C my entire time in community college, I would not have been able to get With Highest Distinction on my transcript - I could get one B, but just one.
The honors credits were kind of a nightmare. There are three options for honors credits: either take a full-on honors class, do an honors experience for a single credit, or turn any class into an honors class by doing a project. Unfortunately for me, most of the honors classes were for general education courses which I took immediately in my first 15 credits of my degree, before I was admitted to being an honors student. You see, I started college back in Spring of 2020, just before the pandemic broke out, which means all my courses for my first year or so of classes I had to take online; so, I did the easy general requirement classes during that time. That left me only one honors course I could actually take (honors english 102), and the rest of my credits I did through projects (the honors experiences sometimes don't run and you aren't supposed to rely on them).
The projects on paper are not that hard, but there can be some bizarreness to them. For a project, you pick a topic at the beginning of the semester and get your professor to okay it so that you can proceed and work on it the rest of the semester. Your professor ultimately grades the project and decides whether or not you receive honors credit at the end of the semester. Your professor can say no to your project idea, or doing a project at all, right off the bat - or they could be a total asshole and not give you credit at the end, though that never happened to me. I did have professors tell me I couldn't do projects for their class which caused me some stress, though. The project itself consists of a five (or more) page paper with three (or more) "scholarly sources", then you have to present at an honors showcase at the end of the semester with a poster. The poster is not actually graded, just the paper by your professor, but if you win the poster presentation you can win prizes. I won one of them and got to go on a nice, intimate trip to Albuquerque to the University of New Mexico which was one of my better college experiences - but if you don't care, you can just slap a poster together and you're good.
Because I was taking almost entirely STEM classes for my Mathematics degree, the problem with projects crops up pretty quickly: what the fuck am I supposed to decide to do a project on at the beginning of the semester before I've even taken the class? If you're walking into, let's say, a calculus III course or a differential equations course and you have never taken these classes before and know nothing or next to nothing about the material, how are you supposed to have a godly idea for a project right at the beginning regarding the material? Because of this paradox, I did two of my three projects in my two computer science classes because I'm pretty good at coding and I was able to slap together some nice programs that barely had anything to do with the course material but would be impressive enough to get me the honors credit. In my intro to Java class, I created a basic polynomial simplifier that would add, subtract, multiply, and divide terms using infix notation and simplify a given equation to its most basic form. It had some major limitations, but overall I thought it was pretty impressive I was able to do that in a class where most people barely know how a computer works. For my object oriented programming and data structures class, I made a SHA256 hash generator by hand based on pseudocode algorithms and the NSA patent, which was a little less involved than the previous project but required some funky bit manipulation work in Java, which I had never experienced before. Overall, the projects ended up being great, but I stressed myself out so fucking much both times because I picked projects, and signed contracts for projects, which I did not know if I would have been able to complete. I managed to pull it out though over the course of the semester just by grinding as hard as possible. The intro to Java project probably took me 100+ hours of work to get fully functional and relatively bug free. As you can see, the projects can be a lot more involved than just "write a five page paper," especially for STEM.
My last project I did this spring semester, which was for differential equations. Finally, I got to do a project for a math class! It was actually pretty fun and I wish I had more opportunities to do math projects during my associates. My differential equations class used modeling scenarios from SIMIODE as the homework every week, so I just picked a really difficult project from there that mixed differential equations and calc III and did that. My professor wanted me to present my findings in front of the class, so I got on the whiteboards and explained the material I believe pretty well. It gave me a taste of what it's like to teach a class, as I got to stand at the front and go through everything and explain the inner workings of the math to my fellow differential equations students. That was pretty good. That also happened to be a class with my favorite professor as well (Professor Gary Kellgren), so I had a lot of fun with it and he always understood that I was trying my best and putting in as much effort as I possibly could to get everything to be perfect.
Ultimately I ground out the 15 credits (3 from honors english 102, 4 each from intro to Java, object oriented programming, and differential equations), and yeah, that's how I got the cool title after my degree. Much blood, sweat, and tears went into the process.
Now we get to something a little meatier: what was the quality of education like?
Let's just get out of the way that my math education was absolutely amazing. I took calculus I, II, III, differential equations, and discrete math at community college, and each class really expanded my understanding of mathematics in new amazing ways. Calculus II I took with Professor David Dwork, who is amazing, and calculus III, diffy q, and discrete I took with Professor Gary Kellgren, who, again, was my favorite professor by far at community college. The first calc class I didn't need to take again because I remembered most of the material, but it was still helpful to retake as I was able to refresh a lot on limits after a long break from doing them in high school. It was also the first class I took when I came to college to get myself back in the groove of school.
Not only is the math education great, but the actual building that the math classes took place in is by far the nicest building on campus. There's math-specific free drop in tutoring in the building, a math-specific testing center, study rooms with whiteboards, all the faculty offices are easily accessible, half the classrooms are stocked with computers, and there's lots of different math-related art details on the very glass-centric architecture of the building.
I feel like the other departments were lacking, however. The physics department was in shambles and there was only one or two options for both of my physics courses (mechanics and E&M), and my E&M class I was stuck taking the class hybrid with our one class meeting a week being 6-8pm on Monday. Because physics is so lab-heavy, the second physics class almost all the class periods were labs, so there was very little time for lecture and the book kind of sucked. The mechanics class I had to take live online, too, and also at 6-8pm on a Wednesday which completely sucked; not only that, the professor was always late to class and would hold us over. Being in class at 8:30 at night when you have to wake up the next morning at like 5:30 to get to work at 7 is the worst experience ever, and does not encourage learning.
My other classes were alright. I liked my world religions class, REL100, quite a bit, and the computer science classes were okay - the material was boring but it was a good refresher for me on how programming works, and it gave me an excuse to mess around and program stuff. I took a Linux class, CIS126DL, which is supposed to cover the material for one of the Linux certifications (maybe it's Linux+?), but I didn't realize there was a second half of the class or something because we only covered the first half of the material, so I wasn't totally prepared to take the exam after the class or anything. That was my only available elective credits too, just that one class, so I didn't have room in my degree to take the second half and have it covered by the Pell Grant. I still want to get a Linux certification (ideally the Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator certification if I can), but I guess that will have to wait until later into my education.
Remember when I was talking about the free tutoring in the math building? Well, I work there! Professor Dwork noticed that I was helping students with the class material outside of class time for free, and one day he asked me if I wanted to get a job with the school tutoring officially. I accepted his offer and put in my application, and I've now worked as a math tutor for the school for a year and a half. What an awesome job, but what a hard job as well. Students come into the tutoring center completely drop-in drop-out, pull up their homework from any math class in the entire school, and basically point at it and say, "What did I do wrong?" or "Can you help me with this?" You'll often be helping two students simultaneously - one of them is taking MAT114 which is the remedial college algebra class, and another one is cramming calculus III for an upcoming test. Two entirely different paradigms, types of math, expected speed of being helped, and two different levels of knowledge requiring different teaching methods. Often in the tutoring center, I'm the only one who knows how to help with the harder or more high level math courses, so it falls on me to help students when everything else fails. In fact, last Fall I was pretty much the only person working in the math building tutoring and I was working 40 hours a week half the semester keeping the place open and helping 10 students at once. Sounds awful, but once you get in a groove it's not so bad. (It also helps a lot if you don't make mistakes while helping people because that will easily double or triple the time it takes to help.) The nice thing about the job, though, is there are times in the semester and during the day that you either get no students, or you get only a couple regulars that you know really well, so you have some downtime to work on your own homework or studies and still get paid. At times like these I just consider my job a research job and crack open a math book from our collection and work through some random problems, keeping myself up to date on stuff I might not be that confident on. I really love my job and I love helping people, so I'm so lucky that I was able to get this position. It pays like total crap, but that's realy the least of my concerns when it comes to the kinds of jobs I like to have. The thing of paramount importance is that I'm contributing to my own studies and also helping other people as much as possible, and I definitely get both from being a math tutor.
I think I'll round things out by talking about my social life that I've had at college. For most of my time at college, I only made friends from helping people with math and I didn't really know anybody outside of that context. That was okay with me, since I love math and I have tons of fun helping people with it either at work or in my free time, but it wasn't particularly fulfilling, and there was only a few people that I would actually consider friends that would do non-math things with me. I had a friend named Mark two Falls that played Oldschool RuneScape with me over winter break, but that was really about it.
After working at my job for so long, though, I started to pick up a few actual friends that wanted to do things with me outside of school. I got to experience a little bit of the party life in college, meeting up with 3-5 people at a time at my place or theirs and staying up until 2am playing video games or chatting or swimming. This was really the first time in my life I had friends who were somewhat well adjusted and had their shit together and wanted to do things, and we all somehow equally like and respect one another to the point that we have a very close bond both individually and as an entire group. I would give anything to keep my current friend group, and it's really helped me to realize that I am a person who matters that people would actually want to spend time with. Maybe that feeling comes naturally to some people, but to me it's completely new and unique, and I'm loving every second of it. And I wouldn't have met any of them if it weren't for both my job as a tutor and my time at community college in general.
And now it's all over. My time at community college, Spring 2020 to Spring 2023, is all over now. I've gone on trips, I've made a ton of friends, I've learned so much about math, and I have a degree to show for it no less. Everything in my life really has been falling into place over the last year and I'm so excited to see where I end up next. The plan is that in Fall I will start attending ASU, and my first semester I'll be taking two math-major upper-divison math classes, Hebrew 101, and philosophy of science. I hope to learn Hebrew (or any second language) while I'm getting my degree at university so that I can expand my horizons and immerse myself in a different culture... and also because I want to write poetry in more than one language, of course. I'm not going to be an honors student anymore - it was too painful in junior college, and the honors college Barrett at ASU I've heard some negative things about, but who cares. A degree is a degree at the end of the day.
Maybe next you'll hear of my education will be when I get my Bachelors of Science in Mathematics at ASU! That would be very exciting.
May 15, 2023