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abdullah-albyati · 4 years ago

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My 15 Year Journey To Get My Bachelor's Degree

You might be asking yourself why it took me fifteen years to get my undergraduate degree? If so, please bear with me for a minute and read along while I share my journey. I hope this can inspire and motivate anyone working on achieving something.

I was born in Baghdad Iraq. I never really got to know my father because he was killed in action during the Iraq-Iran war when I was two years old. I was raised by a widowed mother who did everything in her power to have me and my three siblings get our education in the best schools available in Baghdad. With that in mind, education was a very important thing for me growing up. I remember when I was a kid, my friends and I would tell each other to make a wish whenever we saw a shooting star. I would always wish that I could go to college and graduate.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to make that wish happen for me. Prior to 2003 the situation in Baghdad was boiling, and news was coming that the United States was planning to free Iraq and overthrow the dictator’s regime. For our safety, my mother decided we should migrate to Syria and live there until the war was over.

So we sought refuge in Syria. Due to the timing of our move and me having to work to support myself and my mother, I missed two years of high school. At age sixteen I was working two jobs. I knew I needed to finish high school and go to college because that was the DREAM. Since I was busy working and had already missed two years of school I decided the best option was to keep working while going to a private institute that helped students get their GED diploma. I began taking GED classes at the Institute in Damascus while working two or three jobs. I eventually passed the exam and graduated high school.

I was so happy that I could finally apply to attend college and make my dream a reality. So I applied to Damascus University and was accepted into Damascus University College of Archaeology. I was very interested in History and Archaeology and really wanted to attend this college. Here is a picture of me happy at Damascus University (The picture was taking a few years after I was accepted)

I was so happy. I got my books and made a great group of friends. I was attending lectures and living my dream. But this dream came to a crash about six months into my first year of college when I got a phone call from the university administration office informing me that I was accepted into the university by mistake. I was considered a foreign student because I was from Iraq and in order to continue, I would have to pay about $3000 a year. Asking me to come up with that amount of money in Syria is like asking someone to come up with $50K in 10 days here in the U.S. It was impossible for me to afford that.

You can probably imagine the devastation that I felt at the time. My dream was no longer possible and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t come up with that amount of money. I was sad. I was angry. I thought it was unfair that this was happening to me. It was 2006 when that happened and my brother was working for the U.S. Army as an interpreter in Iraq. He suggested that I come and work with the U.S. Army in Iraq and save money to go to college.

So here I am again, having to put my education on hold, and deciding to work for the U.S Army in the most dangerous area of Iraq at that time. I walked to the Local Nationals Interpreters Office of FOB Warhorse Baqubah where my brother had arranged for someone to pick me up and assign me to a unit to work with. From late 2006 to mid-2010 I worked with about five different U.S. Army units, mostly Military Police units, translating, surviving, and being inspired by the sacrifices and the hard work of the U.S. Army Soldiers in Iraq.

My time as an interpreter taught me everything. Working side by side with U.S. Army Soldiers showed me the real meaning of sacrifice. I told the Sergeants that I worked with that I wanted to go to the United States and that I wanted to join the Army and be a U.S. Soldier.

On September 2010 I made it to the United States and on my first day in San Jose, California I went to San Jose State University and got myself a library card. I got to see the college campus and started thinking about college again, but as we all know college is not cheap in the United States either. For a new refugee with little to no money, I thought to wait a little bit and maybe think about college later. I spent a year in San Jose, California working part-time jobs and volunteering for a refugee settlement program at Catholic Charities helping to get refugees like me settled in the United States.

On June 2011 I walked into the Army recruiting office on Stevens Creek Boulevard in San Jose and stated that I wanted to join the Army. A month later I took the oath and joined the United States Army and in January 2012 I was shipped off to Basic Training.

After all this time, a college education was something I still wanted to do. During my time in the Army, I took part-time college classes, but spent the majority of my time and effort on obtaining certifications in Cisco Networking Associate Certification (CCNA), CCNA-Security, Linux+, Data Science and Data Analysis courses and an Undergraduate Certificate in Information Technology from Penn State University.

I knew that certifications were in high demand and that there were many online courses that taught high demand skills. I choose to concentrate on Data Analysis and Cybersecurity because I knew that after the Army I wanted to go back to Silicon Valley and work for a tech company.

In 2018 I was honorably discharged from the Army and in October of that year thanks to shift.org I started a dream job as a Data Analyst at Uber in San Francisco. In October of 2018, I took advantage of the GI Bill benefits and I enrolled as a fulltime student at Western Governors University in their Data Management/Data Analysis program. Thanks to the amazing support of my college mentor and WGU, I finished my Bachelor's Degree this month, June 2020, in under 2 years with only 21 credits transferred. All while working full time at Uber.

Dreams do come true. Keep working hard and don’t blame life or others when things don’t go your way. Work hard, play hard, and great things will happen for you.

#personal #story #my story #gradution

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