Suzi, that sounds fantastic to me! Go for it. Project Management is a useful field that transfers well, too.

A cat's claw piercing a thumbnail.

aurelia, you're up to date on tetanus shots, right?

Suzi, I'd look at options that are not going to put you in more debt unless you are looking at a career change that might increase earnings.

I tend to be very debt shy and retirement savings obsessed though, so consider that.

Suzi, I took an online project management course, and I feel like it was useful.

Zenkitty, I hope that's the end of in-house mold problems.

I have a Misfit, and I tell it when I'm going to bed. It does seem to do a decent job tracking sleep, but then once I'm going to bed, I'm usually not reading or whatnot. If it tracked my weekend fanfic reading as sleep, that would be a problem. A possibly hilarious problem. Anyway, I have a mile round trip from parking to my office, so that nets me a lot of steps. I have a large three-library complex I can walk the length of, even when the weather's not great. So on office days, I can usually get 3/4s of the way through my 10,000 steps without much bother. If I go out to lunch that'll knock me right past. On non-office days I usually end up on my exercise bike, watching tv and doggedly knocking off the points.

Suzi, I'd look at options that are not going to put you in more debt unless you are looking at a career change that might increase earnings.

Yeah, my Masters immediately got me a $20K raise, so I'm on track to finish paying it off in 10 years, but the loan payments have been kind of a bitch.

I'm probably going to start the Stanford Advance Project Management course in the near future. I intend to do it mostly online since the in-person modules are 3x as expensive. I should be able to get some tuition reimbursement through work, which will help. After that, I probably should start thinking about a Masters program.

I won't be done for two more years. Never too late for more education!

I need to hear this right now, because I'm kind of struggling with finishing my bachelor's.

Not that I'm struggling with the school work.

I'm struggling with trying to figure out how to make the finances work, both through the next two years finishing school, and then figuring out how to pay for a move, where I'm going to move to (with back-to-LA being the preference), and then what I'm going to do afterward.

But even looking shorter term, just trying to survive over the summer (and through the rest of school), I'm barely scraping by, and shit that happened over the last eight months has emptied my already emptied coffers, and kinda jacked me over financially at a point in time where I really didn't need that additional challenge.

Y'all are impressing me with your drive to return to school. I am all for continuing education although in my case the financial returns have pretty much topped out, so it's all on me now. I do have friends who returned to get an MSW or an MFT after finishing their doctorate, but it hasn't paid them back in earnings.

And, of course, the flip side of my dilemma is that if I don't finish this, there's NO possibility of it improving my earning potential, and this was all for worse-than-nothing.

Adding the MBA didn't increase my income, sadly. Actually, the BS didn't add to my income in the sense that my current job doesn't require one. But I still think getting those were good decisions.

Do ask about tuition assistance at work, Suzi. What mine will cover varies with what kind of program one enters, but if I take individual classes that are work-related I get 100% reimbursement, so that is working out pretty well for me at the moment.

Sorry to hear you are having a hard time financially, Sean.

I have every faith that you will finish, Sean. I'm sorry that it is so hard financially.