There are significant ways in which my college experience here at UNF in the first decade of the 21st century is vastly different from that I had at FSU between 1965 and 1970. For one thing, when I registered for my classes at FSU in the mid- to late 1960s (told you I was old!), I stood in line for up to six hours for the privilege of going into a crowded, noisy, hot gymnasium to go from table to table picking up computer punch cards (I am not making this up) for each class, and discovering that one of the earlier classes I picked up, which I desperately needed, conflicted with another class that I also desperately needed and which was only going to be offered that term. There was a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And of course, nowadays, you kids have it soft by registering from home in your pajamas! Let me tell you, that's the bomb!

Then there's the subject of placement tests. I had to take the Spanish placement test in order to jump over Beginning Spanish I & II and Intermediate Spanish I. I have to have Intermediate Spanish I & II as prerequisites for the Spanish paleography course, but don't have enough time to take both courses. I called the World Languages Department and talked to a very nice student assistant who was filling in for the secretary. She mentioned that I had to take a placement test, and I had visions from my prior college days of sitting in a hard metal folding chair (which at my present age is very uncomfortable) in a dank, dark, gloomy room with pencil in hand, taking a few hours to do the test, and having had to pay for the privilege. I was sitting at my computer at the time I was entertaining this dark vision, online, and I realized that the young woman was giving me a URL. I put the URL in, and there came up the page for UNF placement tests. The conversation went:

Me: "You mean I take it online?"

Student assistant: "Yes."

Me: "Now?"

Student Assistant: "Yes."

Me: "For free?"

Student Assistant: "Yes."

Amazing! I took the test and did certainly well enough on it to skip Beginning Spanish I & II and Intermediate Spanish I.

Messing about on the UNF website, I discovered yet another difference: the Language Lab. Back in the day, using language lab meant going to a too-small room where there were turntables (using old vinyl records -- I TOLD you I was old!) where you'd sit with headphones which had been on who-knows whose greasy head . . . yuck . . . And you sat there self-consciously as you tried to repeat what you heard without being too loud. Even with little booths, which there weren't always any of, you felt like a goof. But now, it's all online, and in the comfort of your own home, in your pjs . . . It don't get no better than this, as they said in the beer commercial a few years back.

Return to Karen Rhodes, Non-Traditional Student.