The Learning Journey

Harold Vernon
Old Dominion University
IDS493_24794
Professor Carin Andrews
February 6, 2026

            My journey with higher education began in the exact midpoint of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2021. Through high school I had been educated online like many other people during the pandemic, however I was fairly accustomed to online learning because I already had experience with the services offered by Whitmore School as part of my homeschooling which had begun just one year into middle school. This made my education experience through the pandemic much easier in relation to others’ experiences because I was already fully acclimated to the online learning environment. It was in this context that I entered higher education at Virginia Peninsula Community College or, as it was called then, Thomas Nelson Community College.

My entry into the college environment was mired in liminality as it was during an uncertain period where vaccines for COVID-19 had become widely available but restrictions to prevent the virus’ spread were still in place. There was an air of uncertainty for the whole of society at the start of my college education that would come back in a different form near the end of my education. When the pandemic did end, I needed to start attending physical classes in order to receive the benefits from the GI bill my father gifted me after he realized he did not need a college education to find a well-paying job due to the extent of skills acquired in the navy as a chief. The required math class for my degree was the first in-person class I had taken since middle school. I took it in the spring semester of 2022. I readjusted to the physical learning environment much more quickly than even I had expected, managing to succeed in the class despite the difficulty of the subject – calculus. That was perhaps the hardest class I had taken in my early years of college education.

In the early years, I generally trended towards filling up my schedule mostly with easy classes. This was when I had a lot of classes to complete in order to finish my degree. Therefore I could pick either the classes that were more or less just rubber-stamping the information I already knew or the classes that genuinely interested me. It would be inaccurate to say that I picked exclusively “easy” classes, as there is again the calculus example. There is also a class I took that taught me how to design an HTML webpage which I found very difficult and barely made it through. There was another class about computer logic that was difficult but I managed to complete it. Overall, there is an observable pattern in the classes I chose during my two years at Virginia Peninsula Community College where I select two easy classes, one interesting class, and one more difficult class that is directly related to my degree and not just a general requirement.

The end of my time at Virginia Peninsula was defined by two oceanography classes. Both were probably the most fun I have ever had in college. Not because they were easy – there were many difficult sections – but because they were engaging. Oceanography was a topic that personally interested me because of how alien the aquatic environment is compared to our own. When people say “the real aliens are underwater, not in space”, I can definitely see where they are coming from because of what I learned in Virginia Peninsula’s oceanography classes. Both of them concluded with a trip out to conduct some research on the waters of the Chesapeake with my classmates. The first oceanography class trip involved gathering samples from the dirt underneath the James River. The second was more involved in that I had to take an animal from the marsh (I chose a blood worm) and analyze it to prepare for a presentation. The second was more engaging than the first, which is why I remember it more distinctly.

After that final semester at Virginia Peninsula, I transferred to Old Dominion University to complete my degree. The drive from my Toano home to Old Dominion was significantly more difficult than it was to Virginia Peninsula’s Williamsburg and Hampton campuses. However this difficult drive, in a way, caused the material I learned at Old Dominion’s in-person classes to “stick” more than what I learned at Virginia Peninsula on average. It can be said that this illustrates the importance of challenge in actually learning new information and methods. Even if the challenge is not directly related to applying new information, the challenge of acquiring said information makes it more likely to imprint on one’s mind. Because of this, I am now semi-fluent in Spanish due to Spanish being the first in-person class I took at Old Dominion.

The difficulty of acquiring the information is also why I gained so much from the ethics and philosophy class I took at Old Dominion. I learned how to present ideas and not what to think but rather how to think. It was during this time, however, that the long journey of moving began. I had lived in Toano for as long as I remembered, but in 2025 I moved down to Suffolk to an apartment. The process of moving took place throughout spring and summer of 2025. Starting late in the spring semester and concluding during summer break. I stayed in an apartment in Suffolk for a few months with my parents while they prepared a move to Huntsville, Alabama.

Fall, 2025 was when I attended my last in-person classes before I had to begin paying out of pocket for classes at Old Dominion due to my father’s aforementioned GI Bill funds running out. It was also the beginning of my return to the liminality and uncertainty that almost everyone was feeling when I first started my college education. This, however, was more personal. I was in between permanent houses. The in-person class I attended during Fall, 2025 was the most unconventional class I had ever attended because it was less of a class and more of a weekly gathering in a single space for students to work on PicoCTF challenges. Culminating in a competition where my fellow students and I had to convince an AI chatbot to give us the keys with a limited amount of tokens.

During winter break of 2025-2026, I moved again. My parents moved to our home in Alabama while I moved to a family friend’s house so I could stay in Virginia to complete my education at Old Dominion University. Here now, I am back in the liminal world that I started in. This time, however, I am alone in liminality. A family friend’s home attending an exclusively online final semester. Despite my experiencing liminality alone, I am less bothered by this liminal state than I was by the liminal state that I entered higher education in. This is because I have grown so much as a person over the course of these four years and several months. I look forward to moving to the house in Alabama with my parents when I complete my studies here at Old Dominion University.