About the Author:

Alexander Price is a non-traditional student at Rutgers University, finishing his degree in his late-20s. Working full-time and taking classes at night, he blogs about his experiences trying to straddle the real world and college. Start a conversation with him on Twitter – @asprice18.

Summer session is never a particularly fun time, and sometimes the commute to and from work is about the only sunlight you see during this time of the year. The trick is to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Summer Session 1

Time Period: May 31 – July 5

This session is pretty easy to get through. You’ve had about a month off since the end of the spring semester, and you’re feeling rested, gorged on video games and social activities, and ready to pump through summer. Basically, it’s the more optimistic of the two sessions I take. The real test of your endurance comes during Session 3, though. After a fast-paced six weeks that take up all of June, you spend July 4 weekend relaxing and thinking about how you’re halfway done. Then you get to the middle of Session 3.

Summer Session 3

Time Period: July 8 – August 17

This session starts the Monday after you finished Summer Session 1 (and takes you up pretty close to the start the fall semester). This year I was registered to take Anthropology of Native North Americans (say that five times fast), and Multimedia Sports Writing. The latter had me poised to go to Phillies games and write post-game reports and attend news conferences, and that was my little treat to myself for the (hopefully) last Session 3 I’ll ever take. Then, reality struck.

Due to low enrollment, a lot of summer classes have been cancelled. My Sports Writing class was one of them. Never one to simply roll over, I immediately checked to see if there were any requirement-filling classes available. Seeing as I have one more quantitative reasoning requirement left to fulfill, I found and registered for course number 730:201, also known as Intro to Logic, in the philosophy department.

It seemed like the perfect storm: only a 200-level class, the word “Intro” in the title, and the philosophy department? What could go wrong? This has got to be fun word problems and stuff, right? Wrong.

The class is essentially the basic principles to computer science, deductive reasoning, and involves proofs that make my head spin. The further we get into it, the more lost I feel. The upside is that the midterm we took last week was returned. I was hoping for a C, judging how I felt after the 2.5 hour test (and that was only 8 questions). Turns out I got a B+, but I still have a LONG way to go to ace the final. The one big push is that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. I just hope it’s not a train.

Any words of encouragement?