Pierpont BOG AAS and IT certifications

[raekwon]

Here's my recommendation, instead of going for an emphasis in IT at Pierpont for their BOG AAS, you may want to have a different concentration to show for.  In other words, if you take enough Sophia.org courses, you can have a concentration in Business instead.  Just in case it will land you something in the "Business" field if you want to enter that realm later.  That is if you have a little more energy/time on your hands, it won't cost much more either... not all courses will transfer into the IT degree you're looking for though.

Since you're starting off with 0 credits and possess some IT Certs...it's optimal that you're going for a BSCIA at WGU, further to that, you may want to see if PUG IT degrees will accept your certs or provide you more credits, you want to keep your options as open as possible and swing to the one that you can complete cheaper, easier, faster.  You may want to see which is more beneficial to you in the end, it may better prepare you for a supervisor/leadership role.  You've got a pretty good plan already as I just reviewed your other thread as well.

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If you're taking the ONU courses, do you know which courses you're taking? They're for RA grades, it'll be used for calculation at Pierpont, but do you need more than one?  Is it for your future degree after Pierpont or WGU?  I would take as many courses as possible that will fit into the Pierpont/WGU degree using alternative credits unless you require anything with graded credits.

Thank you, this is very helpful. Not a bad idea to have an emphasis other than Info Systems. I'll have to see.

From what I've seen, WGU's BSCSIA will be the best option for my time/money budget and my interests, as far as undergrad goes. I'd strongly considered Purdue Global and SNHU as well, but WGU came out the winner. After that, I'm not sure what I'll be doing. Grad school is in the back of my mind, but there are at least four vastly different routes I'm pondering taking if I even do that. (Continue with cybersecurity? MBA or MS in IT management? Education/teaching? Divinity school?!) I'm trying to only worry about getting this BOG AAS and then the BS from WGU for now.

I'm not sure yet which ONU courses or other exams I'll be taking. I'm still in the preliminary stages of planning this thing out, but I'm definitely trying to come up with a combination of courses and exams that'll serve me best with regard to covering degree requirements at both Pierpont and WGU, exactly like you said.

Also, I've noticed that folks here really love the Sophia exams. What's the advantage of paying for them over doing Modern States courses and getting free CLEP vouchers? (That's been my tentative plan for at least College Algebra, English Comp 1/2, and Information Systems.)

For English Comp, definitely do NOT do Sophia. For the others, you have to consider your time investment as well. In the same time as it would take you to complete one ModernStates course and schedule a CLEP exam, you could be done with two or three Sophia courses. You can complete Sophia 100% from home, while that's not recommended for ModernStates. While you can, theoretically, do at-home CLEP exams, there are SERIOUS privacy concerns with the specific proctor that they use. I don't know about you, but it makes me uncomfortable to know that I would have to give 100% control of my computer settings over to some person who may or may not actually know what they're doing. These concerns do not exist if you go into a CLEP testing center, but then how much is your time worth traveling back and forth? Unless you live almost atop a testing center, you need to account for your time spent traveling back and forth.

tl;dr: most Sophia courses are faster and ultimately cost less than ModernStates exams. This person did at least 7 in a matter of a day or so.

Awesome. Super-helpful. Thank you so much.