A Confession
I only got an A-minus in the second semester of the Java class, but it's a legit grad-level grade (which I assume meant subjecting myself to a stricter rubric) and I can't pretend I didn't do some slacking there, especially toward the end of the semester when I had that whole death-in-the-family thing to contend with. I only had one long dark night of the soul where I considered bagging on the whole endeavor,* which feels pretty good to me. I wasn't totally humbled, nor do I have much interest in turning these new skills into a career. I am pretty sure I'll take more classes that involve actual software development, but I'll probably stay in that 'Instructional Design' concentration. Probably.
* Weirdly, the necessary simple tedious MASSIVE coding requirements to build a UI for a Java program with interactive elements, which isn't nearly as challenging conceptually as a lot of the other content, was what drove me to despair. But at the end of it I had a working calculator program and I got to show it to my dad (who is a self-taught programmer) and he got to be like "Ugh, programming is so boring, I don't know why you bother with it when you're such a good writer" which was sweet.