These are the college classes that led to me getting my Associate of Science degree, and a lot of them are very special now that I think about it, so it’s going to be tough condensing all of that specialness into one post. But I’ll try.

First off, there is a good chunk of math in my degree: College Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, and Calculus Based Physics (physics is a science subject that relies heavily upon Algebra). I could’ve chosen to have gone into Calculus II and Calculus III, but I decided not to. Anyways, I did pretty good in these classes (A, A, B, and B respectively), and this will help you understand what I was feeling when I was going to take Full Sail’s math test.

Then there’s Composition I and II. I loved these classes. The year before Running Start, I had done very good in my English 10 AC class, and I thought I was a really good writer (this was actually the year I started to write reviews on Gamespot I’m pretty sure). So I was excited to go into Composition I, where I could hone my writing abilities. I definitely honed them, but it also showed me I had some work to do on my writing.

Composition I focused on structuring paragraphs in regards to one idea per paragraph, having an introduction with a thesis and having a conclusion, and just, in general, structuring the whole essay properly. We focused a lot on writing essays in response to articles or pieces we had read in the class, so one of my teacher’s main points was that we should not just write crap that won’t add anything to the discussion: we should add differing perspectives to the discussion somehow whether it was through agreeing or disagreeing (or both!) with the article or piece.

I actually ended up not doing this on my second essay in the class, so my teacher told me I would’ve failed it. Luckily for me, he didn’t take the second essay as a grade, and I learned from that experience. It’s something I still have to think about as I continue to write: adding nothing to the industry when I write is a waste of time.

But Composition I also showed me something else: I had some bad writer’s block (and a healthy dosage of procrastination). Whenever I had a paper due, I made sure I started writing on it three days before it was due, and I would spend all day of those days writing the essay. Sure, some of that time on those days was wasted procrastinating away on the internet, but a lot of it was still due to writer’s block. I didn’t know how to flow into other paragraphs that well, and it was hard for me to think up ideas for my papers.

Now, writer’s block seems like one of those things that can only be changed by practice, and I’d say that would be true to a certain extent. But it also definitely comes down to how you should structure your essays in regards to ideas and in regards to what points each paragraph should have.

Composition I helped me with all of these things I’ve talked about, but it didn’t help me fix everything completely. By the time I was done with Composition I, I was definitely a better writer, but if I didn’t take Composition II, I wouldn’t be able to write like the way I do right now.

Composition II was taught by a different teacher, and I was upset at first because I really liked my Composition I teacher (we both had a love for Breaking Bad and for talking shit about The Walking Dead). But my Composition II teacher was even better I feel. What’s crazy is that he took a lot of the ideas that my previous teacher taught me and either expanded or reiterated upon them.

Some of the new things he taught me were transitioning from paragraph to paragraph, sandwich quotes, backing up your statements with academic journals, transitioning from sentence to sentence, and then grammar. All of these things helped me even further with my writer’s block because not only did me learning all of this stuff add more tools to my toolbox, it also made me understand how to use those tools—someone having a toolbox full of tools that they have no idea how to use is like Donald Trump having a brain and look how well that’s turned out. Along with having several essays that I had to write in the class (including a 10 page research paper titled “Modern Slaves and the Complexities Surrounding Them”), my writer’s block has now diminished to a level where I rarely even notice it anymore.

The grammar portion of Composition II also deserves a special shout out because I don’t think it’s normal for college Composition teachers to focus on grammar, but it was something I really freaking appreciated. My grammar up until that point had been pretty good because I had a fantastic Language Arts teacher in 8th grade, but there were some things I was confused about like semicolons and colons. Luckily, my teacher assigned out different topics to groups of students, and he made each group teach the class about these topics. The topics included comma splices, semicolons, colons, parentheses, and other great things. Now, colons and semicolons aren’t something I use guessedly whenever I write.

So my math classes and my Composition classes helped me with my Full Sail career in some ways I am keeping secret from you for some of my next posts, along with some more obvious reasons you could probably guess, but there’s something in my Rock Valley College transcript that you probably could’ve never guessed would be really important for my degree: programming.

I know right? Who the hell thought there’d be so much of that math coding crap in game development? It’s bullshit. Luckily, I decided to take Intro to C++ Programming sophomore year of college when I was finally able to start picking my own classes.

Up until that point in my life, though, I only had some experience with HTML and CSS, but that was the only programming I ever picked up on. I didn’t really do much with that knowledge though (until I had to code some of the pages on this site).

Now, I figured out sometime in high school that I wanted to be a game developer, so at one point in high school, I tried to learn Python (a language declared easy by everyone). I had no clue what the hell I was doing with that crap. The tutorials made no sense whatsoever to me, so whenever I made a program, I was just typing the code the tutorials told me to type, which caused me to learn jack squat.

Eventually, a year or so later from the time I tried to learn Python, I tried to learn C++ because I knew it was really important for becoming a game developer. I tried really hard to understand the tutorials, and I put hours into it. But I just had no clue what the hell I was doing when I was coding. The tutorials didn’t make sense to me at all!

Now, having tried to learn programming by myself, I was excited and nervous to take an Intro to C++ programming class. I was excited because I really wanted to learn programming, and I thought that maybe being taught in a class environment would help me learn. But I was also nervous because I didn’t want it to end up like my previous trials at programming. Luckily, I jived with C++ this time around.

One thing in life that is constant is that I’m always getting smarter, so when I don’t get something, and I try to learn that something after a year’s hiatus, I’ll have a better chance of understanding it because I’ll be smarter. I’m not sure this was the case for when I tried to learn C++ by myself: I think the tutorials might’ve just sucked!

I mean, the topics in Intro to C++ Programming are not bad at all. You just need to be really good at algebra and arithmetic, and you would be able to understand C++. The weirdest thing is that when I did C++ in college, I didn’t learn anything that I recall even glancing over in the tutorials I had used before, so it makes me think those were just straight up stupid.

But yeah, I did really good in the Intro to C++ class, and I really enjoyed programming. Math had always been something I really enjoyed up until that point, and programming is all math based, so I really liked programming. The topics we went over in Intro to C++ were basic things that are standard topics in all high-level programming languages: variable types, input/output, control flow (loops, switches, and if statements), functions, and arrays (both 1D and 2D). So nothing too hard, but this was my first time working with a high-level programming language like C++.

On the day of finishing my final in Intro to C++, my teacher, who definitely made programming easier to get, asked me if I would be taking the second part of the class: Advanced C++ Programming. I told him no because it would’ve interfered with one of my classes I had planned for the spring semester. I think I had planned to take Calculus II over the summer and then Calculus III during the spring semester while also taking the second portion of Calculus Based Physics. Well, the thing about my Calculus Based Physics class is that while I got a B in the class, I had failed all of my tests in that class. It was tough as hell, and I didn’t want to take the second portion. So I dropped all of my Calculus classes, and I decided to take Advanced C++ Programming because the knowledge I’d gain in there would easily outweigh all of the Calculus and Physics I would learn.

So I had Advanced C++ coming up my next semester at RVC, and I had no clue what I was going to be getting into. The basic topics in C++ were very, very easy I felt; however, it seemed like during the class, some people struggled with it—there was a crazy bastard in my class who said Calculus Based Physics was better. As a result of some people not caring for the Intro class, only one person from my Intro class went on to Advanced with me.

One thing that was really interesting is how much nerdier the people in Advanced C++ were. Throughout the course, there were a few people who seemed to have really known their shit when it came to programming (one guy had previously just finished a Java class), which made me feel stupid. I especially felt stupid because the topics in the class got much, much more difficult.

It was ridiculous how easy the Intro stuff was compared to the stuff in the Advanced class. The topics in the Advanced class consisted of things like searching/sorting algorithms, OOPs (Object Oriented Programming), composition, inheritance, memory allocation, pointers, friends, polymorphism, exceptions, and read/write functionality.

So everything we learned in this course built directly off of what we learned in Intro, and luckily I had a solid base. But there were just some things that were weird in the class. I eventually understood composition and inheritance, but pointers threw me off so hard. It was easily the hardest thing about the whole class, and it was probably the reason I got an 89 in the class instead of a 90 (I would’ve gotten high honors at RVC if I had gotten that last point). Still, I feel the class was definitely a success; it’s just that the topics in that class needed much more studying and practice than the stuff in Intro, which came much easier to me.

Running Start has had a huge impact on my brain: it filled it up with some knowledge that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. And I’m grateful for that. Eventually, though, my Associate degree of Science will be made obsolete when I get my Bachelors degree of Science, but that doesn’t mean the knowledge I got from the degree will be obsolete.

Now, I’m almost ready to talk about getting into Full Sail’s game development degree and how Running Start affected that experience, but I first want to give one last shoutout to Running Start’s legacy.