My non-official Masters Degree

 For a while now Ive been thinking how i can continue my education but seems its not so easy. I still owe for my undergrad which hasnt helped me that much and degrees are so expensive. Ive been wanting to improve my Computer Science knowledge since i dropped out of a CS degree for an IT degree online. There is also the alure of Data Science the so called sexiest job of the 21 century.

After much research and planning and replanning for months now I have a plan. The only problem is the degree isnt official, Ive decided to use the structure of an online degree to emulation the same education. I wont mean anything to employers but its the knowledge that I seek.

I found two good enough degrees from Open Source Society University, the structure isn't exactly like degrees ive seen in the real world at physical campuses but does cover alot of ground. There is two degrees i was looking at the OSSU Computer Science program which I attempted in the past but gave up as it takes too long to get to anything interesting. Then I looked at the OSSU Data Science program which has been alot of fun and on my second unit now. The only issue is what if pivoting to Data Science turns out to be impractical or too hard and I should have stayed with Salesforce or traditional software development? well i found a solution to create my own degree which I'm calling Masters Computer Science with Major in Data Science and minor in Software Engineering.

So my idea is use the best parts of both OSSU programs and craft my own. I plan to take all the core CS units and take most of the Data Science units as a major. I will supplement with some external units in back end engineering as a minor sequence just in case so i have all my bases covered. This is longer than either but covers the critical parts in particular the CS theory i missed after dropping out.

So where to from here? I will continue with Salesforce for now and treat my learning as a hobby and fall back later on. I will still work on Salesforce certs if i have time during the work day so I havent totally given up on Salesforce. Yes it is a lot of work but I enjoy it and if i'm not working on myself what else would I do.

For now I have the details stored away in a spreadsheet, but once I had to Github for tracking I will post my plan here.