Send Ken To College

How time gets away from me when I am having fun.  It causes me to forget to post for two months.

Half a semester is gone already!  Tomorrow after class will mark the start of spring break.  It seems like only yesterday that I was griping about being made to take a speech class, which I got through surprisingly unscathed.  Now I am just waiting for the results of my GRE.  When I took the computer version of the test it did give me preliminary scores.  I am just hoping something changed between preliminary and final.

I decided to make another of my decidedly un-smart moves when I took the GRE.  I looked at one practice examine briefly after I decided on grad school.  I never looked at it again.  I walked in stone cold on test day and took the test.  This resulted in me doing worse than I expected to on the quantitative section but better than expected on the verbal.

I did pretty much the same thing when I took the ACT test back in the early 80′s.  At that time it worked out well for me.  Of course my brain was much more nimble when I was 17.  Now that I am 43 I have developed a Teflon brain which allows things to slide smoothly off.  The harder the professors try to fill my head full of useful stuff…the faster is slides off.

I just had an e-mail from someone asking what I was really going to do with any money donated.  They answer to that is exactly what you would think.  Every penny will go to my educational expenses, whether it be tuition, books, lab fees or whatnot. 

The person that e-mailed me seem to think this site was generating large sums of money.  Nope, that it isn’t,  So far no one has found me a worthy cause to use the donate button and the Google ads really do not generate an substantial sum.

I currently attend a college where I pay a little over $10,000 a semester (which just so happens to be a little less than I have earned at my job this year).  I have one more semster to pay for and then I will be attending grad school at UNI next fall.  UNI will cost me about 1/3 what I am paying now but in these tight economic times, we all have to get creative in how we fund things.  This website is my creative way of funding my education and trying to prevent accumulation of any more student loan debt.

I will need it.  Should I manage to get into the grad school of my choice, I will be driving 51+ miles each way to campus.  This is not alot to some people but considering I hate driving, it is nearly forever to me.  I am also a stingy person.  I refused to go any further than work and school while when gas was high.

Just this evening gas was at $2.19 a gallon for the ethanol blend which means I may start traveling a bit now.  I own a 2005 Toyota Corolla which gets about 30 mpg on the highway.  Even if gas were to stay close to the current price that would still be $9-10 a day on gas.

This is not a thought that I relish so I hope a graduate degree makes me a significant amount of money over a BS.  Notice that little donate button on the right?  Please feel free to make frequent use of it.

EDIT:  Ok, so I wrote this post in the wee hours of the morning.  When I woke up this morning I was scanning news sites while having my tea. On MSNBC I find an article on Exxon Mobile and their new all time record profit for a quarter.  Over the last 2 quarters they made in excess of $26 billion. And we were paying how much for gas??

Story is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27453305/