Prerequisites to the Prerequisites

Since attending an informational meeting about the Occupational Therapy program at the U of Minn, my plan has been to take a heavy load of classes this fall.  Applications for the OT program need to be turned in by sometime in March or April to have a chance of being accepted for the following September and 5 of the 7 prerequisites have to be completed before applying.  If I want to start the OT program next fall, there is no other option.

At least that was the plan until Monday when I talked with someone at the registrar's office at the community college I'll be attending this fall.  Five of the classes I need have prerequisites.  Two of those are one of the other classes on the list and in order to take Anatomy I need to take chemistry and biology (in that order).  For some reason the classes I had in High School don't count.  Besides that, I also need a certain level of math in order to be able to sign up for Statistics.  My college degrees waived the reading and writing placement test but not the Math.  After looking at a sample test online, I knew I'd better brush up on my Algebra.  Four years of math in HS assured that the problems didn't look completely foreign but I hadn't a clue how to solve many of them.  I guess that's why prerequisite classes have to be taken within the past five years.  The day of reviewing Algebra helped but I still didn't do as well as I had hoped on the math placement test.  As things stand now, I get to take 3 classes before they will let me into Statistics.  My Math skills are still good enough to figure out that when I add the prerequisites of the prerequisites to the prerequisites it will take 2 years before I have them all completed.

My niece asked me this week why I was wearing my glasses all the time.  (I had previously wore them for reading.)  I told her I was getting old.  She responded, "You're not old.  Anyone who is still in college isn't old."  There you have it! 

I am now a licensed driver in Minnesota and my car has MN plates.  What amazed me was that I needed to furnish no proof of residence.  They actually took my word for it when I said I lived at my address.  It felt very strange walking in there without a file of papers to prove that I'm who I say I am who lives where I say I live.  The bureaucracy in this corner of the US is still pretty simple - at least compared to my experience in France.