I despise the University of Houston. I chose to attend there for all the wrong reasons (fear, mostly, which kept me away from the school I really wanted to attend, USC), and I regretted it even before I began. I managed to stick it out for almost four full years, at which point I had to leave to get a job and take care of my six-month-old son. Ever since then, UH has been a plague. They keep putting imaginary fees – sometimes upwards of hundreds of dollars – on my account that I have to pay if I want access to my transcripts. It’s not malicious – they’re just so badly run that none of their departments talk to each other and their systems contradict themselves. I knew this even before I began, when I received an application to the school from the housing department, who told me they couldn’t process my housing application until after I was accepted by UH, even though I’d been accepted for months at that point.

Anyway, I’m not going to go a full round with UH again in this post. I’ve done that enough over the last 12 years of blogging. I hate the school and want nothing more to do with them ever again, but sadly had to interact with them again this week. Once again, there was another hold on my account, with more money to pay even though I’ve had nothing to do with the school in 11 years since my last attempt to get free of them. Ironically, when IT set me up with an online account, it literally said I owed nothing, but I still had to put through a payment of $20 just so they would take the hold off and let my transcripts go through to SNHU. Whatever. I just paid the extortion money, and hopefully I’ll never have to deal with UH again.

I’m going back to school this fall. I’ll be honest: the idea of returning to school is not one that I treasure. The biggest thing my 3.75 years at UH taught me was that I despise university learning. Would I have learned this had I gone to a competent school that didn’t make me feel like I was repeating high school all over again? Unlikely. But that’s what I learned, and in the 20 years since I left, I’ve had recurring nightmares about returning to school that have reinforced the revulsion.

It’s not that I don’t love learning, because I really do! Frankly, if I could GED my way out of undergrad classes and start straight on grad school, I’d look on the whole situation far more favorably. But alas that’s not how this works, and I don’t know how many terms I’m going to have to complete at SNHU before I can get a basic degree and then move on to library school. I’ll find out soon. The application process is complete, and I’ll have the “decision” soon – I’m 99.9% sure I’ll be accepted – and then I can figure out which two classes I’ll take for the first term starting Aug 31st. Hopefully, enough of my 106 completed hours from UH will be able to transfer across to SNHU that I won’t have too many repeats along the way. I’d like to be done with undergrad school ASAP.

So wish me luck. I’m not worried about the classes themselves. Mostly I just need to overcome the revulsion and antagonism and wariness that I feel about classroom learning. Thankfully SNHU is fully asynchronous, so I can learn on my own time and in my own way, which is far more like the self-taught courses I’ve continually given myself over the last 20 years since I left UH anyway. Hopefully, SNHU can help me recover some faith in academia and reawaken the love of school that UH murdered in me.