Three more chapters to go

I've almost finished my master's degree via online courses. The biggest difference between online classes and regular classes is online classes you have to teach yourself a lot more. In regular classes, you can go to lectures and listen to the teacher talk. On online classes, it's mostly reading from the textbook and doing a bunch of other, well, pretty much busy work.

As an undergraduate student, I would buy the required textbooks, do the required reading for the first three weeks and then realize the teacher was teaching straight from the book so there was no need to keep reading on my own. Instead, I would use the books only to complete study guides.

My final semester, I got a pretty crazy idea. I decided since I didn't read textbooks anyways, I would forego buying them my last semester. This seemed like a good idea the beginning of the semester when I didn't have to fork over $200-400 for textbooks before school started. But once classes started, this became a less and less of a good idea. Especially when teachers started assigning assignments from the books.

Sometimes I would borrow a book from a classmate, but as the semester dragged on, this became a chore and resulted in me just skipping the assignments. It's not a coincidence that I earned my lowest GPA this semester. Or that I earned my first "C" my final semester of college.

Not buying/reading textbooks isn't something I would recommend to perspective college students out there.