08-08-2023, 03:03 PM
I just wanted to say thank you to the members of this community and share a few things I've learned so far. I didn't take college very seriously when I was younger. Undiagnosed ADHD played a role, but I can't blame it all on that. I was still able to get an internship that I turned into a full-time job without finishing a degree. Fast forward 15+ years, I was able to get a couple promotions (I know I missed out on others) and was recently involved in hiring a handful of new staff. Looking at big stacks of resumes got me thinking about my own again. Two of the people we ended up hiring had Western Governors University cybersecurity degrees, which got me looking into how their program worked. I was intrigued and I got the sense that it was something that I could do. I had tried some term-based online courses and I knew I didn't want to do an entire curriculum of them. But the competency-based programs, this was new to me.
I started reading about degree acceleration and alternative sources of credit, which of course led me from Google here to DegreeForum. And this is where I found out that Pierpont Community & Technical College will give associate's degrees to people who have credits from regionally-accredited colleges without expecting them to take another handful of courses from yet another school.
So here are a few things that others might have covered, but that I thought were worth highlighting:
--They do require you to have colleges send official transcripts directly to them, they won't process official transcripts that had previously been sent to the student and then emailed to them. That's probably obvious, but pointing that out might save someone some hassle.
--Most transcripts were sent almost immediately via email and then processed by Pierpont within about a week, give or take. CLEP took by far the longest. It seems they only send paper transcripts and it seems to take Pierpont longer to handle paper. From the request to credit took about a month total. Still not terrible at all.
--CLEP College Composition does count for the communications requirement. (I had taken this 10+ years ago during a previous college attempt.)
--English courses with a grade of D don't seem to transfer at all. It's not just that they don't meet the gen ed requirement, they don't get added to the transcript. So if you're close on your number of regionally-accredited credits and you didn't take your liberal arts courses seriously, keep that in mind.
--Area of emphasis courses need to be C- or higher. That isn't stated in recent catalogs, but that's still their policy as of Summer 2023. I would have needed some ACE credits to get an Information Systems AOE that I originally wanted, but I qualified for another AOE with RA credit alone. I decided that I liked the idea of getting the degree faster and getting credit for past college coursework without starting to add more.
--I had to justify that one of my courses qualified for one of the gen ed requirements. I emailed a link to the course catalog from the brick and mortar college noting the department, the course description, and that they consider it to meet a similar requirement of theirs. In this case, that was enough justification.
--The graduation deadlines published in the catalog don't apply to the Board of Governors program. This year, the deadline for August 4th graduation seemed to be on or near July 24th. Multiple Pierpont staff were working well into the evening that day.
--I didn't email Nancy Parks until my transcripts were done coming over, but once I did, things moved very quickly. I don't have the diploma just yet, but the unofficial transcript in their system says the degree was awarded! I know there's a stickied post here saying to contact her. This is just to say that I agree.
My current plan is to study for my CISSP next. A lot of the managers at my current employer have this IT cert and we have a certification reimbursement program that will pay for it as long as I pass, so I think this is a good place for another "win." Although I had initially been eyeing WGU for a bachelor's, I'm also currently considering Purdue Global's ExcelTrack. The CISSP transfers into both cybersecurity programs as a good chunk of required credits.
So thank you again for teaching me about Pierpont's program! I know that a general studies AAS degree is only so much of an accomplishment, but it's nice to put a bow on my previous college attempts and look ahead to what's next.
I started reading about degree acceleration and alternative sources of credit, which of course led me from Google here to DegreeForum. And this is where I found out that Pierpont Community & Technical College will give associate's degrees to people who have credits from regionally-accredited colleges without expecting them to take another handful of courses from yet another school.
So here are a few things that others might have covered, but that I thought were worth highlighting:
--They do require you to have colleges send official transcripts directly to them, they won't process official transcripts that had previously been sent to the student and then emailed to them. That's probably obvious, but pointing that out might save someone some hassle.
--Most transcripts were sent almost immediately via email and then processed by Pierpont within about a week, give or take. CLEP took by far the longest. It seems they only send paper transcripts and it seems to take Pierpont longer to handle paper. From the request to credit took about a month total. Still not terrible at all.
--CLEP College Composition does count for the communications requirement. (I had taken this 10+ years ago during a previous college attempt.)
--English courses with a grade of D don't seem to transfer at all. It's not just that they don't meet the gen ed requirement, they don't get added to the transcript. So if you're close on your number of regionally-accredited credits and you didn't take your liberal arts courses seriously, keep that in mind.
--Area of emphasis courses need to be C- or higher. That isn't stated in recent catalogs, but that's still their policy as of Summer 2023. I would have needed some ACE credits to get an Information Systems AOE that I originally wanted, but I qualified for another AOE with RA credit alone. I decided that I liked the idea of getting the degree faster and getting credit for past college coursework without starting to add more.
--I had to justify that one of my courses qualified for one of the gen ed requirements. I emailed a link to the course catalog from the brick and mortar college noting the department, the course description, and that they consider it to meet a similar requirement of theirs. In this case, that was enough justification.
--The graduation deadlines published in the catalog don't apply to the Board of Governors program. This year, the deadline for August 4th graduation seemed to be on or near July 24th. Multiple Pierpont staff were working well into the evening that day.
--I didn't email Nancy Parks until my transcripts were done coming over, but once I did, things moved very quickly. I don't have the diploma just yet, but the unofficial transcript in their system says the degree was awarded! I know there's a stickied post here saying to contact her. This is just to say that I agree.
My current plan is to study for my CISSP next. A lot of the managers at my current employer have this IT cert and we have a certification reimbursement program that will pay for it as long as I pass, so I think this is a good place for another "win." Although I had initially been eyeing WGU for a bachelor's, I'm also currently considering Purdue Global's ExcelTrack. The CISSP transfers into both cybersecurity programs as a good chunk of required credits.
So thank you again for teaching me about Pierpont's program! I know that a general studies AAS degree is only so much of an accomplishment, but it's nice to put a bow on my previous college attempts and look ahead to what's next.
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