There’s a lot for me to be thankful for this upcoming Thanksgiving.

I am thankful that school is going, more or less, well. So far I am doing good in all of my classes. My first round of midterms went exceeding well where I scored very, very high above the class average. However, my second round of midterms have been a bit of a setback for me scoring around the average. I may have become more complacent, or perhaps it was just an incredibly busy few weeks leading up to my “hell week”, but it’s okay. I still retain A’s in my classes and I hope to keep them as I come out of the semester.

There is, however, the unfortunate news that the graduate committee at KU hasn’t formally accepted me into their MS Computer Science program yet and insists to keep me as still a “non-degree” graduate student. The initial plan was for me to take course prerequisites (which I am doing now) and with a few prereqs out of the way, change my status from “non-degree” to “degree seeking” graduate. Honestly, I’m a bit surprised that I wasn’t transferred even as a “provisional” graduate student since my background is still within an engineering discipline (aerospace) versus something completely different, such as a humanities.

In either event, the “non-degree” status puts me at a setback with even continuing taking prerequisite courses to transfer into the MSCS program financially. A huge majority of financial aid is distributed under the condition that the student is “degree seeking”, and without those magic words under my status (despite the fact that I am seeking a degree) restricts my student financial aid to a null.

However, I had put in a few applications to other schools and their Masters program and fortunately I did get admitted to a Masters program in a Electrical/Computer Engineering and another one in Software Engineering at another University. (Not going to disclose the name yet.)

I’m in the works of handling a few financial kinks to determine whether it would be financially feasible to transfer to that University as soon as the Spring semester (January 2010). If it isn’t possible, I was given the option to defer my admission to Fall 2010, which then gives me enough time to find a job to take care of a few upfront costs.

That being said, I’m back on the job hunt. Despite the economy picking up, unemployment is still in record highs and I have that betting against me. But, I’m not giving up. I’ve sent a number of job applications out the past month and will be continuing to do so until something fruitful comes up. I’m also certain that at some point, I will find a good job where I can use my income to help me pay for my graduate school.

It’s hard for me to find anything to be thankful about being on the job hunt; being unemployed and looking for a job has been such a mind numbing, stomach wrenching experience. But, I am thankful that this time I am allowing myself to extend my opportunity to branch out elsewhere.