It’s not quite the life-altering experience it’s shown to be on TV, but I just received my very first official college acceptance letter. As near as I can tell, my next step is to run screaming to the nearest parent and jump up and down all excited, and maybe ask if they’ll buy me a car for school.

My boss has decided that I need to be educated in not terrifying my peers with my melodramatic and complicated training methods (as if sock puppets and torture devices are really all that inappropriate in the tech industry). To this end, he secured an agreement that The Lab would pay for 100% of my schooling as long as I promised not to leave for 18 months after completing my degree. I can do that; I like my job and don’t mind sticking around.

So, I applied for college. Twice, because I did it wrong the first time – I sent off all the requirements (I had to write an essay; something that was very difficult to keep professional and not at all like my usual writing style) but didn’t actually fill out the application form. Clearly, I am on my way to being an awesome student. They didn’t think too hard about letting me in though, and I have officially been accepted in the BC Provincial Instructor program at VCC. I have a student number and an email address and I can enroll in courses to get myself all certified with provincially instructed goodness.

This entire thing should be hilarious – I haven’t been a student in over ten years, and if anything, my style and methodologies have become even more “special” over the years. You better believe I’m going to submit my Choose Your Own Adventure-style manual as a project – it is awesome (and handily already completed).

I’m not really sold on the idea of molding myself into RoboTrainer, but turning down free education would be silly. My first love is technical writing, but taking these courses will help me in the long run. Besides, I’ll do anything even if only for the experience – and being a student should give me all kinds of exciting blog material that I will exploit so hard they’ll have to come up with a genre name just for it.

The experience and hilarity aren’t the only reasons I’m doing this, though. There are two far more important things motivating me forward:

• If I come out of this as a certified BC Provincial Instructor, my salary band will go through the fucking roof and I’ll be worth a LOT more money
• I will have graduated from two different colleges and still not have graduated high school

Awesome.