I am in one of those sleepless, thinking moods. I have put a ton of thought into how things are going to play out for me academically from now until graduation. Right now I am poised to graduate in May 2009; however, there may be a few snags that could prevent me from doing so.

I intend on doing a fourth co-op term this fall with NASA for two reasons. Firstly, the money is really nice, and it would certainly help with what I expect to be an increase in rent regardless of whether I stay where I am living now and renew my lease or move somewhere else, closer to everyone else that I know. Secondly, I enjoy what I do there, and by being there again in the fall I can see some of my projects come to fruition.  I can also get more experience at project management and engineering, which would prove useful no matter where I end up working after graduation.

Problem with trying to do a fourth co-op term this fall is that in order to do so, I would need to take three courses to graduate on time. One of these courses is a senior design course, and the other two is an environmental engineering course and the other is an intro to geographical information systems (GIS). Normally the maximum number of courses that can be taken at once is two. Even worse, these courses are only offered in the afternoon, which interfers with the normal work time. I am seeing right now if the human resources folks at NASA will sign off on this, and after that is is on to the UAH co-op office to see if they approve.  If this is not approved, it really becomes a question of whether I want to delay graduation to December 2009 to keep making a decent wage or if I want to try and stick with my targeted graduation of May 2009.

Even if the folks at NASA and UAH sign off on this plan, there could be another snag. In the spring of 2009, I will need to take four civil engineering courses and one industrial and systems engineering (ISE) course. If the schedule doesn't change between spring of 2008 and spring of 2009, then there will be a problem with the ISE course interfering with my second senior design course. The two would share the exact same timeslot. If the timeslot does not change, then I will probably be left with no choice but to take the course in the summer. If there is no commencement at the end of the summer, then I won't graduate until December 2009 anyway. I guess I could co-op during the spring and fall of 2009, but it would be nice to finish in May 2009 as I had originally intended.

In case you can't tell, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I want to finish with school and move on to working full-time. School is fun, and I am "good" at it, but it's time for it to come to an end. Funding school and everything else has become increasingly more difficult, and by finishing with school and setting into a full-time job, whether it be with NASA or with someone else, it will provide me with the financial peace of mind that I have been longing since I can remember hearing the phrase "we don't have the money."