At long last it comes to an end. My tortured soul has been released from ITT. As of September 10, neither myself nor my free time will be held hostage by ITT Technical Institute. The mother ship has called me home. I am now a member of the faculty in the College of Education at The University of Alabama. The College of Education is using a system that documents every student in the college and monitors their progress in learning the standards for education in the state of Alabama. Because of the enormous amount of work that it will take to be the guru of the system and teach it to others, they created a new position of which I have now been assigned.

I can't adequately express my feelings over this new position. First of all, I am relieved that the search is over. ITT was killing me. This quarter, I had seven classes. Of the seven classes, three of them I had never taught before and one was given to me a week before classes were to begin. The fact that I had over 30 hours of classroom time was a giant burden on me. Combine that with the time necessary to prepare for three new classes, plus grading for all seven classes and my work week was easily over 50 hours. And then there was the 4 days a week commute. There's $35 - $40 a week in gas on top of another 3 hours a week just driving.

To be working for The University of Alabama is just awesome. I'd rather it be for the Computer Science Department, but I certainly won't complain to be working there in some capacity. The benefits are awesome, and the commute is cut to roughly 10 minutes. I found out Tuesday at my first departmental meeting that the average salary for the college is above the 50th percentile and that raises were around 7-8% last year. With all the perks of working for Alabama, even with the small cut to my salary, I end up breaking even if not pulling ahead compared to ITT.

For one of the first times in my life, I am actually anxious to go to work. I'm not big on 8-5 jobs, but there are too many pluses to working at Alabama. The people I have met so far have been overwhelmingly nice and seem actually fun to be around.

As an added bonus, I get my nights and weekends free again. No more grading and planning for class (at least not immanently). Ahhh, to be free again.