Last week, I turned 51 years old. Tomorrow, I will graduate magna cum laude from UNLV as a double major with a BSBA in Finance and a BSBA in Economics. Why am I telling you this? It dawned on me that while someone my age deciding to go back to college is not all that novel, and my particular story not all that compelling or inspiring, few people my age who decide to get a degree actually write about their experience with the goal of helping others who might have similar ambitions. And let me tell you, there is a BIG difference between attending college as a teenager and attending college when you have kids older than most of your fellow students.
First, let me explain exactly why I made the decision to go back to school. For the past 20 years, I have been a professional gambler. I mostly played poker for a living from 2004 to about 2015, at which point, I began focusing more on sports betting than poker. It was around this time that I became tired of the vagaries and swings of gambling for a living, and I began searching for something new. I find professional poker to be a somewhat toxic environment, and making a living off exploiting weaknesses in others began to gnaw at me. Poker truisms like “Don’t tap on the fishtank,” a saying that discourages the idea of telling other players what they’re doing wrong in order to ensure they keep losing money began eating at my conscience. Watching other professional players befriend rich people so they would keep playing with them and losing money, earning a living off the exploitation of the weaker gambling skill of others who build things that better our country or our world while I merely wait for them to drop crumbs in my lap…it all began to bother me. Poker is a very exploitative game at the professional level, and, upon close, objective introspection, it begins to feel parasitic when you do it for long enough. I wanted to do something that betters society, not be the leech feeding off the weaknesses of those who do exactly that. I wanted to be a builder, a contributor to the world rather than the degenerate, cannibalistic, backroom denizen I’d become. I wanted to stop “game selection,” which means searching for “fish” that are worse players than you so that you can take their hard-earned money. I wanted to stop being a contributor to problematic gambling and an industry that is a net negative to society as a whole. I wanted to stop identifying as one of a group of people who are, collectively, worse people than any random grouping of the general public. I’m not boorish enough to think that if I stop exploiting others they’ll stop losing money they can’t afford to lose, but I no longer desired to be one of the cogs in the great machine that I feel continually encourages those types of detrimental actions.
Starting in 2015, I began writing books. I have always felt that I was a pretty strong writer; I’d written quite a few articles for numerous poker magazines over the years, and I thought I would enjoy writing books. I have also always admired artists and writers for the enjoyment they bring the world through their works, and I felt that was a good way to contribute to society. I wrote and published six fiction novels over the next few years, and it was enjoyable. In fact, I loved writing books. The problem was that it is nearly impossible to break into the world of traditional publishing, and without the backing of the advertising arm of a major publishing company, the chance of financial success, especially for an indie author like myself, is near zero. I would consider a few of my books to be pretty good, and a couple of them to be pretty weak overall, but I know objectively that none of them are great. They aren’t strong enough in plot or style to be best sellers. I think with some work that I might have a chance to get there, but years of writing for a monthly income that is dwarfed by the average contents of the tip jar at Starbucks just sort of killed that dream. At some point, I need to actually make some money, and it didn’t seem that being a professional author was going to get it done.
I was interested in leveraging the skills I learned over decades as a professional gambler, skills like risk assessment, bankroll management, and a mind tuned toward probability assessments in nearly everything I encounter, with the skills I have as a writer, so I began searching for a job that would cater toward those skills and allow me to contribute meaningfully to society. I always felt that if I could get an interview I could manage to talk my way around my lack of an education, and I’ve always felt that a formal education was a complete waste of time and money. I’m a curious person, and I’ve spent a huge chunk of the last two decades seeking knowledge and education in many areas of interest, on my own and for free. I’ve written long, scholarly articles on numerous well-researched subjects ranging from rare earth elements to nuclear weapons to headboards, and I’m enthralled with learning. None of that matters in the real world though. All that matters is that you have a piece of paper from an institution that says you have learned the things they find valuable. And I was lacking that piece of paper. I was unable to get even an interview in any of the jobs I found to be of interest or that I felt would make me a net contributor to society. I was energetic, intelligent, motivated, driven to succeed, and unemployable.
I finally came to the realization that my only option was to go back to school and get a degree.
I’d attended college a couple of different times, many, many, many years ago, and I’d amassed quite a few credits during that time, and so I looked into transferring those to the community college here in Las Vegas, CSN, the College of Southern Nevada. Unfortunately, most of the credits I had amassed came from Everett Community College in Washington State, and that college works on a quarter-based schedule while this system in Nevada uses a semester-based schedule. That meant that my credits needed to be converted to the semester style and pro-rated, which meant that quite a few of them that were 4 or 5-credit classes at ECC would be credited as 2.6 or 2.7-ish credits here, and those were useless in a program of 3-credit classes. Some of those long-ago classes were not recognized today, and many of my electives in criminal justice were useless as credits in a business program. I did get utilizable credit for exactly two required classes, a communications class and a psychology class, so there was some minor value in the hard work I’d done many years earlier in life, but I was nonetheless disappointed that I would be forced to start from very close to square one. Bucking up my shoulders, I sent in my application to CSN and prepared to start classes.
I decided to ease my way back into the murky waters of higher education with four classes that first semester at CSN, starting in January 2021, with Covid still looming with all of its restrictions and concerns. All four classes were online classes, and let me tell you, they were a struggle. The online program had been force-fed into the system with the lockdown of Covid, and the teachers struggled to prepare material and work with unfamiliar equipment and software to convert the live classes they’d become comfortable with, to online classes that required them to actually do something new for the first time in many years. This online-only mandate was still in effect even though it was nearly a year after Covid had flared up, and most other restrictions had already been eased. My classes were Nevada State History (Hist 217), Philosophy (Phil 102), Pre-calculus I (Math 126), and Chemistry (Chem 105) along with a one-credit chemistry lab (Chem 106). At this point I had no idea what I wanted to major in, or if I was even fully committed to this return to education, so I took only these classes that were required courses toward any generic degree. The precalculus class (Math 126) was one that I tested into through the required math entrance test. While I actually enjoy mathematics, I hadn’t taken a math class since high school thirty years ago, and the highest math class I had ever taken in high school was precisely precalculus, a class that I barely passed. My grade on the assessment put me into this class at the absolute bottom score for acceptance into it, so I knew that it was going to be a bit of a struggle for me to catch up with the advanced algebra that I’d surely forgotten over the previous three decades.
Although I hated the online course concept, and the chemistry lab in particular was an absolute joke with the professor having the camera presence, teaching skills, and demeanor of a lab rat being waterboarded, I enjoyed learning the material, particularly in the actual chemistry class that associated itself with the imbecilic lab. Perhaps I would major in chemistry and become a scientist? The ethics class involved a lot of writing papers, and I discovered that my skills as a professional writer were going to be very useful in college and would set me apart in classrooms full of recent high school graduates who wrote like they talked, complete with slang words and phrases like “cause” and “imma go there.” Not joking. I saw these specific examples and many, many other abhorrences in college papers over the last few years. The semester ended in May with me getting As in all four classes plus the lab, and I felt hooked and ready to enroll in more classes.
After taking off the summer, I registered for the fall semester with two goals: find a major to start working toward, and move to live classes instead of online. The Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) had finally reopened campuses, and live classes were just restarting. I’d also decided that even though I love science, if I wanted to put my degree to work at some point, at my age I would be best served with some type of business degree. For my declared major, I finally landed on the one field in the school of business I knew the least about, and that was economics. I was very interested in economics but knew nothing about how even basic things worked, things like inflation and the CPI, and how businesses make decisions based on marginal revenue or demand functions. I never understood how the FED made decisions or what was meant when they “set” interest rates. My thirst for knowledge meant that I couldn’t try to major in a field where I already had some knowledge, thus my choice of the area where I currently knew the least but also would eventually find valuable in business. The other close choice for me was finance, but I shelved that idea for the time being, though I would reconsider that very soon.
Fall 2021 found me enrolled in a full load of five classes: Microeconomics (Econ 102), Macroeconomics (Econ 103), Statistics (Econ 261), Astronomy (Ast 104) and Arabic (Ara 111). Micro and macro economics were obvious choices for my now decided major, and I was thrilled to find out that statistics was an economics class, as I actually love statistics and wanted to explore that field of study a lot more. Astronomy fulfilled my final science requirement, and I would find myself enthralled by this class, learning about how stars are born, live, and eventually die in magnificent splendor. I would once again be lured toward a science degree and further exploration of the incredible fields of astronomy and physics, but would have to suppress that desire in the interests of the more employable degrees. A foreign language class was required, and even though I have a pretty strong background in Spanish and could have floated my way through that class, I wanted to learn, and I found Arabic to be a fascinating choice. I very much enjoyed beginning to learn Arabic, reading and writing in previously unfamiliar script that flows beautifully and reads from right to left, and I will someday study this language much more, however, for the time being, this would end up being my only foreign language class of my college career.
It was during this semester at CSN that I became absolutely annoyed and fatigued by the constant bombardment of “celebrations” that this school loves to propagate. Every single month, and nearly every single week, it seemed that we were barraged and inundated with emails and banners celebrating some sort of made-up holiday. CSN, naturally, has an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I’ll say this for that group of people, they work their tails off to make sure they justify their budget. Every possible race, belief, heritage, or ideology seemed to have a calendar week or even month dedicated to its promotion, and CSN made sure to zealously promote them all with not just one email, but multiple emails that flooded my inbox seemingly every day of the year with reminders and announcements, the marvelously woke administration of this school never missing a single opportunity, including some celebrations that I have never seen promoted anywhere else in the world. Beyond these annoyances, they felt the need to constantly prop up the students with congratulatory emails celebrating even the most mundane of achievements. The email I got congratulating me and celebrating my amazing achievement of 100 DAYS AS A STUDENT!!! was the final straw. Is this what the youth of today need in order to succeed? They absolutely require acknowledgement of every strand of DNA in their body and a continuation of the blue ribbons they got from their 44th place finish in the third-grade fund run? I thought college was supposed to prepare our youth and transition them into the real world, and this pandering, sycophantic behavior of trying to make every person seem special was disgusting to me. Not because I think accomplishments shouldn’t be celebrated, but because I think that mediocrity shouldn’t be celebrated. This is not how the real world operates. No employer is going to throw you a party for working there for 100 days. No employer is going to give you a banner and an animated e-card because its National Deaf Eastern Asian-Pacific Gay Islander week and you have 6% of that in your ancestral history.
I appreciate some of the celebratory months this country acknowledges. For example, Black History Month is, in my opinion, something that has helped bring our nation toward enlightenment and racial harmony. But, Women’s Empowerment Month? LatinX Heritage Month? An email telling me that Halloween is “problematic for Native Americans due to the cultural appropriation caused by revelers donning mock regalia” and therefore costumes should not be worn on campus? Alliances and special Student Unions for every separate race and ideology imaginable. International student celebration week. Dreamer celebration week. Moving Native American Heritage Month to March instead of November and insisting on a series of emails announcing it because Thanksgiving is too much of a reminder of the terrible government-sponsored genocide against Native Americans. Reminding students that it isn’t appropriate to celebrate Columbus Day because he was nothing but “a lost slave trader who brought disease and….trivializes the government-sanctioned genocide against Native Americans and contributes to their overall erasure.” The list goes on, and on, and on. These messages and many, many similar emails regularly flooded my inbox or were left on pamphlets on my car, or were streamed from banners across the campus and it all became absolutely nauseating. The thought that a chunk of the money I was spending on tuition was being diverted toward this absolute nonsense was something I just couldn’t stand or justify any more. I needed to move on. I made the decision to forego whatever remaining classes I could have taken there, and transfer to UNLV where I hoped they would treat students more like adults and less like coddle-dependent children in dire need of an office of DEI so they could be indoctrinated and grow up to become good little liberal soldiers. (Unarmed, of course.)
Funnily enough, I was able to share these very thoughts with the administration at CSN when they solicited the students’ opinion as to why we thought enrollment had fallen so drastically that semester. According to my professors, enrollment for the following semester was off by more than 50%, and the administration could not figure out what was the cause of the plummeting numbers. I was thrilled to write a scathing indictment of their mollycoddling, repulsive, indulgent, DEI force-fed pampering of young adults as if they were timid preschoolers, and declare that although this might not be the reason they were failing at their enrollment requirements, it was exactly the reason that I would not be re-enrolling, despite the extra money it would cost me to take 200-level classes at UNLV instead of at CSN. I’m sure my caustic words were hurtful and that President Zaragoza had to find a safe space to deal with and express his horror at my belligerence, but nobody from the administration ever acknowledged my opinion, which I found to be incredibly alienating and not very inclusive of them.
CSN TOTALS
| Class | Code | Credits | Grade | Cumulative GPA |
| Nevada History | HIST 217 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Precalculus I | MATH 126 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Ethics | PHIL 102 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Chemistry (+lab) | CHEM 105 | 4 | A | 4.0 |
| Arabic I | ARA 111 | 4 | A | 4.0 |
| Astronomy | AST 104 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Micro Economics | ECON 102 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Macro Economics | ECON 103 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Statistics | ECON 261 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Totals | 29 | 4.0 |
In part two, I’ll delve deeply into my experiences, both good and bad, at UNLV, and my decision to become a double major instead of going for just one degree, along with my quest for perfection as I chased a 4.0 grade-point average.
Author Rick Fuller 
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