…. and ‘The Twenty Year Diploma’
January 2000 to July 2020
Click Here to Enter the Chronicles
Sometimes things don’t always work out the way you want them to; well, at least never the way you expect them to. My plans were simple. The same, simple plans every teenager would make in their last year before hitting twenty. Go to college, get a degree, get a good job, or at least find a way to make a decent living; propose to that special someone, get married, have kids; you know, live life the way you know everyone tries to make it.
Yeah, as I said, my plans were simple. But just one misdemeanor of administration made all those plans a lot more complicated and futile than they seemed. This is my story, with a little sugar and spice added, about how it took twenty years for me to graduate from a college diploma. I hope I myself, or someone else, gets the chance to tell it all. We would save a student from a lot of troubles and possibly even save a life or two. Whatever the case may be I’m going to tell you what I can. You can make your plans, save up money for a rainy day, but in the end, the Lord is the One to decide what goes, what not, and how.
Proverbs CH16v1
‘We may make our plans, but God has the last word.’
Alright so let’s cut the chase and get straight to the point. Names and places in this memoire are made up, but the problems are real (I got that from Square One’s MathNet, the 80s show) The year is now 6023ACM, ACM abbreviated from ‘After Creation of Man’ (ref: https://amazingbibletimeline.com) That’s 2019AD on the Gregorian calendar. Since the turn to millennium 2000AD, things began to get complicated and hectic. Not that they haven’t been before, but now, the possibilities that digital technology brought had made things that much more complex.
Times had become like a dreamworld. Imagine something as way-out as you’d like and ‘bam’, check online; someone had either thought about it or even done it. It is a hectic global marketplace out there and everyone wants a piece of it. The technology being used as well is developing so fast that robots are taking over some people’s jobs. Needless to say that to get a job, a good job that is, you need that paper that says you are qualified to provide that service.
Our diploma class at CBEL Academy is graduating this year. That is a big deal for me since I started the diploma program in January 2000 and it’s now 2019. Ha! That’s like twenty years ago. Oh wait, it is 20 years ago. In fact, some of my classmates right now weren’t even born then. It’s almost like I just passed through some type of wormhole and aged in the process. You know what, let’s say that I did pass through some kind of wormhole and was teleported from January 2000 to January 2017. Here’s how the whole trip started.
Come New Years Eve, 31st December 1999, the Y2K Millennium bug was the biggest paranoia on the technology market. Fearing that digital devices would crash once the clocks turned, IT developers had released their Y2K bug fixes months earlier. As the countdown sounded to welcome in the 21st Century, my family and I were in church. Hoping and praying for the best. At midnight the fireworks began to blast. No blackouts, no digital crash and no time-warp portals. At least I think there wasn’t.
Waiting for senior high school results can be a drag, especially from the Cambridge Advanced Level examinations. They can take up to three months before they are released. And you can’t exactly start applying for college or university till you get your results. So we had to wait. That would mean a seven month break from schooling since most tertiary education programs started their first semester in August each year.
My parents really peeve idleness. They get concerned whenever anyone is home all day in and day out, doing nothing; or what they don’t know. And the ‘really’ get concerned. They suggested that I get a temporary job or register for a short course while we waited for the results. ‘Ain’t no thang’, I was getting quite bored just hanging around at home anyway. On Monday, 10th January 2000 I made my way to CBEL Academy to check out what courses they had going.
Good old CBEL Academy. My brothers and I had registered for holiday extra lessons there several times during our senior high school days, {see what I mean when I tell you that my parents peeve idleness}. It wasn’t surprising that the institution was my first choice for a short course, my only choice actually. They had quite a selection of courses that I’d never really bothered to check on. They even had evening sessions for working students. The inquiries office gave me a brochure of their programs to take home for review.
A short course right? That’s what my parents had suggested. Well, how short is short? They had 3 month training programs, 4 month certificate courses, 6 months, 8 months, 9 months, 1 year, one and a half years, 2 years and even university transfer programs. I was really ready to dig in detail on their selection of courses. Ultimately I was ready to study anything in the design field. That’s what I enjoyed the most and also had acquired a few distinctions for in secondary school. But our results weren’t out yet, so…. entertaining a registration in that field was not the best option for me, it was out of the question.
Health and Safety, Travel and Tourism, A Plus Programming, Secretarial courses, Engineering…. I must say that there was quite a selection of programs to choose from. One that caught my eye was a Digital Technology course; designed for IT specialists; teaching the basics of the digital system’s evolution, hardware to programming and software. The only problem now was that the course ran in two six month parts. That would take a year but I’d be an IT expert at the end of it. Topping it up, successful students graduating from the second part would be posted onto cooperative attachments.
I figured that getting into the Digital Technology program wouldn’t be a bad choice at all, besides, the whole planet seemed to be going digital. It would be a good idea to have some in-depth knowledge in that field. My parents sounded just as happy as I was with the whole idea, so I went ahead and registered. That was just the beginning of a many more complicated issues. Missing a university application deadline, starting a university program one semester late, failing my first undergraduate semester, missing 10 Digital Technology exams, registering at an unaccredited design school, dropping out of that then escaping from a pusher mob, attempting to home-school myself with online digital technology and design courses, expired sponsorship, back to CBEL Academy to find a serious economic crisis of 1000% inflation rates, a failed engagement to salvation. Yes, the Lord is my Redeemer.
If I had the chance to change anything at that point in time when I registered, would I really change anything? Well, I guess I would have tried to find out what other colleges in the world were offering that type of digital technology course. Yeah, that’s what I would have done. I would have also checked where the course was being hosted from. I would have probably registered with the host institution instead. Shoula, woulda, coulda is what some of my buddies would say. It didn’t go that way. Now I will take the time to tell you in detail about how it all happened; the people I met, situations I faced, and condolences to the people who’ve passed on. I hope someone would learn something from these memoires, so just to make sure you take at least one thing away, I will ask you to remember this one thing….
Proverbs CH16v9
‘You may make your plans, but God directs your actions.’
You must be logged in to post a comment.