When I made the decision to go back to school in 2021, I didn’t initially tell anyone. I had no idea if I would follow through; after all, I had made this same decision more than once in my life already. When I graduated high school in 1991, I was a terrible student. I think my GPA was something like 2.95, less than a B average. It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of excelling, I just had no desire to try. I managed to score in the 1300s on the SAT test, and somehow that was enough, despite my abysmal GPA, to get me into the University of Washington in the fall of 1991.
At that time, I was 18 years old, had a full-time job working the night shift at a grocery store in Snohomish, Washington, and I was living in a small house with two close friends. I’m not sure I would describe it as a party house exactly, however, we did have a room just to store our beer, and our furniture was mostly milk crates and discarded chairs left on the side of the road, so you can be the judge. The University of Washington was an hour drive away, so I would get off work at 7:30am, rush home to change clothes, drive a half hour to my cousins’ house in Bothell, and then commute with them to the university where we would arrive just in time for 9:00am classes, and just in time for me to promptly fall asleep in the back of the massive lecture halls that held hundreds of students. This would describe a good day. A bad day had me bringing a pillow onto campus and skipping class for the library where they had these amazingly soft couches and I could sleep undisturbed, while my education slipped into the ether like the ephemeral dreams I was enjoying. Being pre-cell phone days, my cousins would have to come search for me so we could commute back north after they got out of classes. A really bad day had all three of us skipping class entirely so we could play poker in a smoke-filled back room at the bowling alley, Kenmore Lanes.
Needless to say, this sort of schedule was not conducive to academic success, and I quickly found my way onto the Dean’s list—not the good one, the bad one—and in danger of academic expulsion. I would never let an educational institution beat me in that manner though, so I quit instead.
Now, almost exactly 30 years later and unsure if I had what it took to be a good college student and focus for the nearly four years it was going to take me to get a degree, I approached with determination, but some trepidation. Unlike when I was a kid and I just wanted to get through the classes I took, I found that as an adult, I wanted to actually learn the material. As I moved from CSN to UNLV, I was fascinated with the courses in which I was enrolled, and with learning from professors who mostly had doctorates and knew what they were talking about. I won’t say that all of my instructors met these criteria. There were a few lecturers with master’s degrees and even grad students teaching some of the lower-level classes, but for the most part, the upper-level classes were taught by competent professionals in their respective fields. As a research university, UNLV requires professors to publish, and much of that work-in-progress would be presented to us during instruction, particularly in the economics department. I found this titillating, and I discovered that adult Rick was a faaaarrrrr different student than was young, idiotic Rick. Adult Rick loved learning and loved school, and I rediscovered my competitive edge, seeking to excel in every class that I took. I didn’t just want to get through the class, and I was incredibly annoyed by easy classes that didn’t challenge me intellectually. While most of my fellow students were thrilled just to pass class, or to get out of class early, or to have a professor cancel a class, I was annoyed, as I wanted the knowledge more than the grade.
There’s a saying in academia that the only customer who doesn’t mind being cheated is the student, and this would be proven true numerous times over the next few years. The favorite professors of most of the students would be the ones with lax grading and sharp curves, the ones that didn’t require students to put in effort. I got this, in a peripheral sense. However, from the viewpoint of someone spending a lot of money for every credit, I wanted value for that money. I didn’t want to be cheated, but I was far in the minority.
In my opinion, the key concept to know and embrace as an adult returning to school is probably just how much technology has changed education. When I was in school in the 80s and 90s and didn’t understand something, I was screwed. I would go home and study my textbook (assuming I didn’t forget it in my locker) and if I still didn’t understand, that was it. There was no viable mechanism or alternative to help me understand. Today, that seems ridiculous. YouTube is littered with instructional videos in every subject, and many of them are excellent. Khan Academy is a free online academy with instruction in all kinds of STEM fields, and other superb instructors lecture on both the mundane and the advanced on many platforms, all over the world wide web, for absolutely free. If you don’t understand a concept, there are dozens of alternative videos online where a knowledgeable person explains it in a different way that you might better understand. Want to know how good your professor is when you’re registering for classes? Ratemyprofessors.com, lets you look up any professor and see what other students think of them before you decide to go with that choice. You have to spend some time weeding through the comments because, as I mentioned, some students complain about a professor who assigns homework or doesn’t curve a test, but I find those professors to typically be above average. Others assign 5-stars to a professor who is lazy or grades very easy, and I find those to be a waste of my tuition. However, overall, the site is fantastic for weeding out and avoiding the truly bad professors…and there are a number of those, even at a research institution like UNLV.
In addition, for most classes one of the students sends out a Discord invite to the rest of the class. Discord is basically an online chat room. The value in that is reminders of assignments due, discussions of the material, and study groups that form for tests. Although I often had Discord muted, and was quite often annoyed by the whining and complaining from a select few classmates, overall, I found it a very valuable resource all along the way. Note-taking has mostly moved from pencil and paper to laptops and electronic tablets that can be drawn upon and uploaded straight into organizable folders. Professors email class lectures, and students can download them and make notes directly on them during the lectures. Office hours often come with online options, so students can increase access to their professors and maximize limited time. ChatGPT, which really became available to the public right about the time I was entering UNLV, has made searching for information and writing papers magnitudes easier and more convenient. Overall, technology has made education much simpler and eased so many of the burdens of the past. There is just little-to-no reason to be failing classes these days with all these available options, and I was in constant stunned amazement at how much easier school was today than thirty years earlier.
With some amount of trepidation, I entered the Lee Business School at UNLV as an Economics major and a Finance minor. Walking into these classrooms for the first time felt a bit awkward. The students look at you as if you might be the professor, but then you take a seat next to them and they carry on normally. It’s unlikely that they’re looking at you as a walking example of a screwup they hope they never become, but it can feel that way sometimes. College classes often require group projects, something they’ve implemented at every level recently in response to employer complaints about graduates who have no idea how to work with others, and so forced integration into group projects becomes the norm in many business school classes. Awkward at first, it didn’t take too long before I became quite comfortable working with kids less than half my age, and I found that when I treated them as equals, they reciprocated, and often looked to me for leadership and guidance, probably mostly because I cared so much about excelling and was willing to shoulder the lion’s share of the workload. Still though, it felt good to run nearly every group project in which I was involved, managing group dynamics and time constraints to get the best grade in the class. I found that as the semesters passed, I stopped considering or worrying about the age difference between myself and my fellow students, and as I advanced into the upper-level classes, it stopped mattering entirely as we all had the same objective and the worst students had mostly been weeded out.
Spring semester 2022 was all about completing the general education classes required of all students. Knowing that at my age, there’s no time to screw around with light loads, and still not fully mentally committed to following through with this, I went for it and registered for the maximum allowable six classes, three of them live classes and three online classes. English Composition (Eng 102), U.S since 1877 (Hist 102), and Information Systems (IS 101) were the live classes, while Critical Thinking and Reasoning (Phil 102), Financial Accounting (Acc 201), and Finite Mathematics (Math 132) were online. This would change a bit on the first day of live classes when the professor for the Information Systems class proffered to the class the option to move it online where all tests would be open-book, open-note, and he would drop the lowest score of the tests, or we could stay as an in-person class and all tests would be taken without notes and none of them dropped. This, in my view, was atrocious behavior as I wanted this class to be live, had intentionally chosen a live class instead of the online version, and the professor decided to arbitrarily make it an online class by offering a non-choice, holding students over the barrel with the disparate options, and holding a vote that was obviously going to be heavily in favor of the easiest option.
My U.S. history class also got off to a rough start when the instructor, a grad student rather than a tenured professor, handed out 3×5 notecards and asked us to all list our preferred pronouns. This is beyond stupid for a number of reasons, the least of which is that she had no idea who was whom in the class when we all piled the notecards on the desk in front of her. Beyond the fact that “personal preferred pronouns” are abject nonsense, how was she to ever know to whom each notecard belonged, and at what point was she going to actually refer to someone by their preferred pronouns in any classroom situation whatsoever? Because this exercise was silly nonsense, I chose my pronouns as “They/Them” and added underneath, “Because these make us feel omnipotent.” Isn’t it good to know that even in one’s late forties, churlish behavior can still overpower common sense?
Despite the performative wokeness of this initial assignment, I very much enjoyed this class which involved a lot of essays and writing assignments, something I enjoy much more than projects or tests. I also, perhaps rather surprisingly, found the teacher to be an excellent instructor. She was a doctoral history student at the time, and is likely now a history PhD, and I think she’ll probably make a great professor somewhere, particularly since when I came up to her at the end of the first class, after the notecard incident, and stated, “You and I are going to fight this semester,” her response was that although we might have some disagreements, she doubted we would actually fight and she looked forward to the debates. That was a perfect response, and I appreciated it.
One last note on this class was that I discovered about halfway through, that it didn’t qualify to meet my U.S. history requirement for the strange reason that classes that fail to cover the U.S. Constitution are not sufficient. Since this class only covered post 1877, it didn’t touch on the Constitution. This was annoying because it meant that I’d taken this class for absolutely no reason whatsoever, wasting time and money that I didn’t have. This was my own fault, and a good lesson in making sure to take advantage of the guidance counseling services that are completely free. A guidance counselor could have told me this information and saved me from having to be referred to as “They/Them” all semester.
The Critical Thinking philosophy class I barely remember, to be perfectly honest. I recall something about linked vs convergent arguments, and something about modus ponens and transpositions, but that is literally it. I couldn’t tell you what these things are today, and so the class really had no lasting impact upon me. Financial Accounting was an online asynchronous class, which meant that you could complete the coursework at your own pace, and I flew through it, finishing the entire semester in just a few weeks and knocking that one off my plate, a great feeling with a full load of classes like this. English Composition was another class taught by an MFA grad student who did a good job teaching a bunch of kids with zero writing skills, and I obviously skimmed right through this class with very little effort as it was entirely writing assignments where I feel quite confident. Finite mathematics was designed as a class to bridge the gap between precalculus and calculus, and I took it thinking that it would satisfy my math requirements, which was technically true, but overlooked something important that I’ll go over later. It covered matrices, networks, optimization problems, and probability, and I actually really enjoyed it.
As the spring semester wound down, I realized that I really needed to take summer classes if I wanted to be able to register for upper division classes in the fall, for the sole reason that I was missing one key class, Accounting 202, and there were no exceptions allowed. I would have to take that class to officially be accepted into the major and allowed to enroll in the 300-level courses, so unless I wanted to be a semester behind, I needed to take it during the summer. Since I would have to be there anyway, I decided to take a full load of summer courses, and I registered in the necessary Managerial Accounting (Acc 202), as well as World Literature I (Eng 231), History of Rock Music (Mus 125), and Government in the United States (URST 241), the class that corrected my earlier blunder and fulfilled my history requirement with its coverage of the Constitution. World Literature was very enjoyable as I got to read a couple of the classics that I’d never before read but had been interested in, such as Oedipus the King, The Odyssey, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. The History of Rock Music was a joke of a class but fulfilled some cultural requirement nonsense, and I was actually quite happy to pound through that one in a short 5-week summer session rather than have it drag out over an entire semester which would have been excruciating.
Qualified now to enroll in actual business school classes, and having completely fulfilled all of the nonsense courses required of all students, I entered the fall semester of 2022 excited to officially start business school. I once again enrolled in the maximum of six classes, this time five of them live and only one online. My live classes were Business Communication (BUS 321), Leadership and Management (MGT 371), Intermediate Microeconomics (Econ 302), Statistics II (Econ 262), and Principles of Managerial Finance (Fin 301). The lone online class was Business Analytics (IS 335).
The two econ classes were thoroughly enjoyable and reinforced the correctness of the decision of economics as my major as I found them intriguing and they made me want to learn more about economics. The statistics class introduced the world of regression analysis, which was entirely new to me, and I loved to work with STATA and different data sets to begin to learn this fascinating component of economic study. I remember precisely zero about Business Analytics. Looking at my work folder from that class, it seems we spent some time with advanced Excel learning and a program called RapidMiner which tabulates databases, but although this information is very valuable, this class was a joke and completely useless. The business communication class was nothing but busy-work as it involved very mundane group projects and presentations which I found to be rather painful. These types of business school classes are designed to teach kids how to grow up and become professionals rather than to teach actual material, and although I understand their necessity, as an adult, they are excruciating, probably one of the worst parts of going back to school at this age. For every one of these generic business school classes, I just lowered my head and did my best to charge forward and complete the work with a smile, looking forward to putting them behind me and moving forward toward the actual interesting classes in my degrees.
The one standout to this semester was Finance 301, an Introduction to Managerial Finance. This class was taught by a CPA, another lecturer rather than a professor, but he was probably the best instructor I ever had. Smart and witty, he was tough but fair, and he conveyed information in a such a way that you could see he thoroughly enjoyed teaching and finding that ‘aha’ moment for each of his students. He didn’t give anyone an easy pass on this difficult material—in fact, I believe the final class grade average was in the upper 70s, probably lower than should be for a 300-level class, but even with lower-than-average grades and certainly some failures amongst the crowd, he achieved the remarkable with a pure 5-star rating on Ratemyprofessors.com, a testament to how good he was as an instructor. He did, in fact, make finance so enjoyable, that I made the decision right then to upgrade what was until that moment a finance minor into a second major, making this instructor the very reason for me achieving the double BSBA major. Of course, not all is ever truly rosy in the real world, and this great instructor would, early the following year, find himself embroiled in an investigation for sexual misconduct allegations, which would be founded and result in his termination. So, I guess not everyone found him to be a great professor after all… I don’t have any information into the allegations themselves, and I make no judgement as to their validity, and if they were true, then he had a darker side that I didn’t see, but the loss of one of the best instructors I would ever have in the Finance Department was a big one, and truly unfortunate for UNLV.
The end of this semester wrapped up my first full year at UNLV, and I managed to make it through with nothing but As in every class, though a couple came close. This is probably a good spot to talk about how different professors define the grading scale, because its pretty important to pay attention to that when you’re looking at the syllabus for each class, as there is rather wide disparity even in similar classes. For starters, UNLV, or at least the Lee Business School, requires a C for a passing grade. This means that a D, and even a C- if the professor gives that grade, are failing grades. So, if you’re sitting there with a 73%, its pretty important for you to know if that’s a C or a C-, and some professors use altered grading scales, so it can be even more complicated than that. There are professors who consider a C to be 75% and above, and others who say that 67% is a C. There are some who don’t give A- grades, considering 90%+ to be an A even if they give minus grades on the other letters. There are some who do give A- grades and the cutoff can vary between 92% all the way up to 93.9% for that minus grade cutoff. Needing to achieve 94%+ to get an A is quite difficult, and figuring out how to do that can require some work.
For me, what usually came into play with these various grading cutoffs, was what I needed to achieve on the final exam in order to get an A in the class. With six full classes each semester, study time for final exams was finite, and I had to allocate those hours carefully. If I was sitting at a 98% in a class and there was no A- grade such that an A was 90%, I would probably allocate very little if any time studying for that final exam. So, each semester, I would calculate the grade I needed on the final exam in order to get an A in the class based on all these different cutoffs. There were times when I needed to get only 50% or 60% on a final exam to get an A in the class simply because the final exam wasn’t weighted heavily enough to drag me into the B arena with even that low of a grade. There were times when I found I could completely skip the final exam and still pass the class, though that usually meant getting a C, which would have been unacceptable to me, but it was still nice to have no pressure for at least that one exam.
Then there were times when I was sitting at something like 87% or 88% in the class and I needed to absolutely nail the final exam or final project to get me up to an A. This is how I would allocate my study time in the last couple of weeks of class in order to get all these As and excel, and there were definitely semesters where I was sweating my final grade because I knew it was going to be close. I found that the more time I allocated to the class during the semester, typically the less time I would need to allocate to the final exam, but all the classes had different difficulty levels and required different allocations of time, so it was always a delicate balancing act. I assume that other students performed at least some version of this balancing act as well, often probably just trying to pass the class, not to get an A, but I don’t know. Maybe if you’re struggling just to pass you don’t have the wherewithal to think along these lines.
Of all the classes this year, the only one that I think I really came the closest to not getting an A in was MGT 371. This was a very strange class, and the professor required a massive journal project with all kinds of stipulations on what needed to be in it, including very annoying requirements such as writing down things you’re grateful for and ways that you tried to be a better person each and every week. I, of course, am rarely grateful for anything, and I’m already about as good a person as you’d ever want to be, so this was a struggle for me, (this is a joke, calm down) and in fact, I didn’t really record anything at all the entire semester. When the end of the semester was nearing, I was sitting at a solid B- in the class and knew that I would need to absolutely nail this journal assignment to have any chance of an A, and even then, I would need the professor to probably weight it heavier than the 30% the syllabus suggested would be its weight. So, along those lines, I allocated the entire Thanksgiving break to conjure a journal out of thin air, and let me tell you, I hammed up that mf’er. I probably spent 40 hours on it, and I ended up turning in a 73-page journal filled with gratitude and good deeds, and then wrote four pages about how this assignment had made me a better person and turned my life around, making sure to point those pages out to him when I turned it in to ensure that he saw them and read them.
I got an A in the class.
The professor later told me that when he read that section of my journal, he told himself that he was giving me an A no matter what the rest of my grades looked like, so sometimes getting an A is really all about working the system and solving the puzzle of what the professor is looking for, rather than taking a rigid approach to the work itself. This is, of course, an outlier type of class, and this type of manipulation would get you precisely nowhere in many of the courses, especially in economics and finance where answers are finite rather than manipulatable, but solid performance, both in business and in school, is often about finding ways to succeed by analyzing the situation and thinking outside the box.
Here’s the full breakdown of my first year:
| Class | Code | Credits | Grade | Cumulative GPA |
| Financial Accounting | ACC 201 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Composition II | ENG 102 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| U.S. since 1877 | HIST 102 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Intro Information Systems | IS 101 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Finite Mathematics | MATH 132 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Critical Thinking & Reasoning | PHIL 102 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Managerial Accounting | ACC 202 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| World Literature I | ENG 231 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| History of Rock Music | MUS 125 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| U.S. Government | URST 241 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Business Communications | BUS 321 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Statistics II | ECON 261 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Inter. Microeconomics | ECON 301 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Prin. of Managerial Finance | FIN 301 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Business Analytics | IS 335 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Leadership & Mgmt Skills | MGT 371 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
In part three, I’ll go over what the remainder of my time looked like at UNLV, and I’ll discuss the surprising amount of rampant cheating that occurs regularly in these classes. I’ll also talk about what happens when a gunman walks onto the campus and goes on a shooting spree, killing three professors right before finals week.
Author Rick Fuller 
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