Graduation - Andrej and KaiyaAfter six years, having attended two different colleges on two different continents (with a year and a half break in between), meanwhile getting married and having Kaiya…finally, today was my graduation. My parents and my sister came yesterday and we joined about 350 other graduates and their families and friends in the ceremony. (Ryan and Dan, thanks for showing up. It was very good to see you there.) My degree is Bachelor of Science in Business Management, if you were wondering. If you want to know the whole story how I got to this point, read on, otherwise, you've already read all that's important in this post - my parents and sister are here and I just graduated. :)

In 2000 I moved to Zilina, Slovakia and started studying Informatics at the University of Zilina (Zilinska Univerzita). The idea of my major was great - to "produce" a Software developer that is well-familiar with all business processes, business analysis, accounting, hardware concepts, etc. However, in real life it appeared to be yet another difficult program with lots of memorization. Many of my classes were taught by professors that were also the authors of the textbooks used. The exams were oral, in the professors office with just you and the professor. The grade from the exam was your final grade - the work you did throughout the whole semester was just so that you'd be allowed to take the exam.

At the end of my third semester I was having a hard time passing a preliminary exam (the pass/fail one that if you pass, you will be allowed to take the real exam). After my third attempt, the professor told me that I'd have to retake the whole class the following year (which meant retake the whole year) - she said, "I'll see you next year." In my mind I immediately knew, "no, you won't." There were two of us that day with similar fate. We sat in my car for quite sometime in silence and asked each other, "what just happened to us?" That was my last day at the university with the exception of when I went to pickup my paperwork six months later.

The next year I studied at TCK (Training Center Kompas) in a one-year youth leadership program. I enjoyed this year a lot and was able to learn a lot about God and about people. At the end of that year, Jessica and I got married. I also applied to three different colleges in the States in order to finish my college education. I was accepted at Cornerstone University into their Computer Science program.

We arrived to South Carolina in August 2003, and about two weeks into the stay we moved to Michigan. We took out student loans believing it was the right thing to do and I started school. I have never studied so diligently until then (student loans will do that to you). I was hired as a student technician in the TechSupport department at the school and enjoyed working there. At first, my admissions counselor told me that none of the credits I acquired at the University of Zilina would transfer and I had to start from scratch. So I became a transfer student with 0 credits. After the first semester, my academic advisor expressed doubts that no credits would transfer internationally and started looking for an organization that would be able to evaluate my Slovak credits and be able to "translate" them into American equivalents. After a few months of waiting and hunderds of dollars in evaluation fees, I got the reports showing that I would receive 31 transfer credits. I was excited.

About 5-6 weeks into my second semester, a full-time position opened up in the TechSupport department, I applied for it and have been working there ever since (so far 2+ years). I also transferred to an accelerated evening program at the school - the closest degree to my field of study was Business Management so that's what I chose. From March 2004 until September 2005 I had classes every Thursday 6pm-10pm, and study group meetings almost every Monday for a couple of hours.

After I was done with the program in September, I was still about 17 credits short of graduating. I was missing Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Science credits. I looked into CLEP tests and here's what I got: 12 credit test in German, 6 Credit test in Fine Arts and Humanities, 3 Credit test in Personal Finance, 3 Credit test in Software Applications, 3 Credit test in Software and Hardware Concepts, 2 Credits for A+ Core certification, 2 Credits for A+ Operating Systems certification.

I also almost graduated with honors - I had a very good GPA, just not enough in-house credits - most of them transferred in. So that's a loooooooong story long.

Graduation