Portfolio Challenge

With the goal of finishing my AAS this semester, I enrolled in a class on portfolio building.

Completing this class is, of course, required in order to finish this degree. What no one told me was that this class is typically only offered in the spring semester. I've gone for advising every time I was about to sign up for classes, and not once did someone say, "oh hey, your plan for trying to graduate in the fall has one tiny flaw: you can't." No, it didn't really come up until I was trying to sign up for classes for the fall.

I wasn't alone in this however; several other students were aiming to do the same thing. I guess enough of us spoke to our advisers that administration decided to list the class in the course schedule. Of course, the class actually becoming reality was contingent on enough students signing up for the class. It seems silly to me that a capstone class (one of the classes you take your very last semester) should require a minimum number of students to save it from being canceled. How many students graduate from these programs each semester anyway? It couldn't be very many. The department is small, the program is a subset of that, and then the number of students who actually make it through is an even smaller subset. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that there were only five of us that wanted this class.

Unfortunately, 5 wasn't a large enough group to warrant a class. I heard that the class had been canceled from a classmate in the summer who was one of the 5 that needed to finish by December. She told me the news, but she said that right after she found out she had a conversation with Dave Correa, the instructor who had been slated to oversee the portfolio building. The instructor had told her that she might attempt to "test out" of the class.

Testing out of the portfolio class is a bizarre idea considering there couldn't be any sort of test administered for the subject matter. It's also very unusual because this is one of the courses you take to prepare you for entering the workforce. But once I heard the idea, it made perfect sense. I've already got a portfolio made. I imagine many of the students in this field do to, since subject matter we are learning about is, primarily, how to present information on the world wide web. Why wouldn't we all already have websites that present the work we've done? All we have to do is show that we know what we're doing, get credit for it, and then we can be on our merry way.

So my classmate said this was definitely what she was planning on doing and that I should contact the Dave Correa and make the indication that I wanted to challenge the course as well. The story from here on out is a bit bland and heavily involves the mechanics of academic administration. In short, I've met with the dave and I am now currently working, independently, on revising my portfolio to meet the challenge deadline in early December. Wish me luck!