I've been considering going back to school and taking some courses that are available to me. With the associates that I already have, I was weighing the options that I have available to me. Computer Science is a classic and could probably get me very far with the "need a piece of paper" folks, but it's more software development than I have a passion for, compared to my troubleshooting, find a problem, solve a problem desires. Cybersecurity is probably going to be more dependent on certs than anything I can learn in a class, especially if it's ever evolving and a degree can be outmoded very quickly. Computer Information Systems sort of has my attention because it seems like an IT based degree with elements of a business setup and not as laser focused on coding. With the courses that I currently have under my belt, it would be more for CIS than it would be for CS, but more CLEP and ACE options so it about evens out.

Does Computer Information Systems hold any water in any of your opinions to what Computer Science has to offer? Or is it somewhat arbitrary anyway?

Do you have a weekly or daily routine? A preferred application?

For context, I’m an ecologist that focuses on statistics and modeling and I work in a few different ecosystems. I’ve always struggled to feel like I have a good understanding of the literature and I think there are a few main reasons.

• Quantity: It’s overwhelming. There is so. Much. Research. And there’s more literally every day that is or might be relevant.
• Sources: Relatedly, there are so many journals to try to keep up with. And certainly more that I should be keeping up with that I’m not even aware of.
• Method: I haven’t found an interface that really works for me. I end up ignoring emails with journal table of contents. Scrolling through RSS feeds on Zotero or Mendeley is awful. Going to the journal websites is even worse.
• Scheduling: I block out time in my calendar, but there’s always something else I’d rather work on. It’s hard to force myself to focus on it.
• Workflow: The exploration-exploitation trade off. If I skim through all the titles of a bunch of different journals, I end up just spending the whole time downloading papers which then sit in my Zotero library without getting read. If I stop to look in more detail, I don’t get through much of the article list.
• Retention: It’s hard to read something over and really retain it. I’ve taken notes (digitally and on paper) but that adds to the time it takes to skim titles and abstracts, which reduces the number I can cover.

One of the downsides of everything being digital is that I also find it harder to skim an article and get the gist of it. Flipping through a magazine lets you skim the titles and figures to easily get the main idea. Online, I need to read the title, click in a new tab if it seems interesting, scroll around to skim the abstract, and scroll and/or click to the figures. Flipping back and forth to the abstract or different sections is also harder.

What I’d really like is something kind of like a forum or link aggregator where I could skim titles and click an expander to view the abstract and figures.

I did a masters in data analytics, and then the niche I fell into in the working world was building dashboards, reports and spreadsheets of financial data for non-technical bureaucrats. Instead of ensuring data quality by technical means, my current company often just has me manually reviewing and checking financial data. This is pretty frustrating to me because I have no education in finance, and the things I miss or get wrong are so second nature to my boss that he doesn't even see them as something I should have been trained on. The only technologies I use are SQL server and excel. Any proactive steps I've made to automate processes has been discouraged as not worth the time.

I'm aware that most people spend years on tedious stuff before ever getting to work with more engaging technology, but honestly I'm starting to wonder if they've forgotten I'm not a finance guy. I want to move up in my career especially to escape my current role, but I'm feeling completely lost as to how. There's no obvious role in my company that could be a 'next rung of the ladder' to advance into, so there's nobody I can emulate to help chart a course. My boss had an unconventional path to his current role, and isn't really into manager stuff like career mentoring, so he's no help in that regard.

To anyone with experience in data science, what is the advancement supposed to look like? What are the key skills I should be developing? Am I being too averse to learning the subject matter of the data I'm working on? Any insight is appreciated!

I'm quite a few years out of highschool, and recently went back to school.

I'm enjoying the environment (weekends and sometimes online), which was one of my biggest worries, because I tried doing more school right after high-school and it did my head in.

However, I'm struggling with actually learning the more dry stuff. For a few of the courses there's stuff to calculate, there's problems to solve and such, and I can get that to stick and not dread doing it.

That is not the case with the very dry legal things... how do I learn stuff like that? Any tips? Because right now I'm looking at basically trying to brute-force it by hoping to be lucky and re-re-re-reading the entire book hoping the right stuff sticks for the exam.

Screenshot for clarity

My understanding was that after I graduated, I would have a six-month grace period, during which no loan payments would be due.

At some point during that six-month grace period, my university should have notified "the feds" or my loan servicer that I had graduated, so that they could appropriately adjust my loan status and start date of my repayments.

Well, we are seven, almost eight months post-graduation, and my loan repayments still are not due to begin until December 2025.

I'm still looking for a job, so if I can continue to put off repayment, that would be great.

Of course, if my loan status finally updates, and the servicer realizes I was supposed to start repayment in July 2024, but didn't, then that would not be great.

What do?

_{Literally this evening I intended to just go ahead and sign up for the SAVE plan, so I wouldn't have any payments until I got a job, even if my loan servicer woke up and realized their mistake. Unfortunately, republicans hate America, so that plan is looking dead in the water. I might go ahead and try to sign up anyways. Maybe I will continue to get lucky.}