Academia beckons…

Now that I’m halfway through my ridiculously expensive A.S., I have been informed that our school is being vetted for a bachelor’s program that they’ll conveniently be starting not long after I graduate here. It’s like the damn Art Institute add-on all over again. Especially since it looks like AAS added a culinary management bachelor’s recently. Figures.

I’m already here and digging myself a nice ditch of student loans, so I’m starting to think that I may as well stay on and finish it. I’ve heard (and not just from people who get paid to tell me) that there’s a serious shortage of qualified management degrees in this field, and that my math aptitude is a big bonus. Good times. And since I’m already going to be $40k in debt by the end of this, what’s another ten or fifteen grand, right? It’s just like buying a nicer BMW instead of a mid-range one, right? But even with Florida residency and the cheaper tuition that gets me, finishing my undergrad somewhere besides El LCB will be a pretty big pain in the arse, involve a lot of backtracking, or both. Which brings me to… grad school! I thought I’d left behind all this talk forever, but here it is staring me in the face again.

Apparently FIU is one of the top-ranked hospitality school in the country, after, oh, Ivies like Cornell and Penn State, and heavyweights like UNLV and of course #1 Purdue (but I’ve kissed that program goodbye already). It also happens to be incredibly cheap for residents, and has a campus in Tianjin. The externship coordinator here is also feeding me info about a couple master’s programs that sound suspiciously interesting, and of course there’s the Bastyr set I was looking at before I even came here.

On a mildly related note, I’ve discovered I can sit for the Certified Dietary Manager exam after graduation, so that’s one more thing to do.

So in a way, I’m back where I started. But it would be nice to look at something like this or this or even this later.