I filed my enrolment application today. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science for digital business, class L-31, Università Telematica Pegaso, one of Italy’s accredited online universities. A hundred and eighty ECTS credits ahead of me, an empty transcript, and twenty-five years of work that count for nothing inside it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve enrolled in a computer science degree. The first was right after high school: computer engineering, abandoned in the second semester. Not because of the code, I could already do that, and in a way that was exactly the problem. It was the maths. First-year maths looked like a smooth wall to me, no handholds anywhere, and I had no idea how a person was supposed to climb something like that. I turned around and went to work, which in our trade you could do then and can still do now.

It worked out, for what it’s worth. Twenty-five years of software, of teams, of products that ended up in someone’s hands. Nobody has asked about my qualifications after the first interview, and for a long time I assumed the matter was closed.

Why I reopened that file now, after all this time, is something I can’t quite explain even to myself yet. Some of the reasons I’d write down; others I’d rather keep until I understand them better. Let’s say that at some point I stopped treating the whole thing as settled.

The choice of an online university, on the other hand, is the easy part to explain, and it’s a choice a software person makes. Lectures are recorded, so I watch them at six in the morning or after dinner, the only two hours of the day I genuinely own. No lecture hall to get to, no timetable set by someone else, no collision between the university calendar and the work one. The study model looks a lot like the way I’ve worked for twenty years: asynchronous material, pace set by me, real deadlines only once I book an exam.

Then I opened the curriculum and read it straight through, the way you read the changelog of a release you’ve been waiting for. There are the subjects I enjoy and start ahead on: programming, algorithms, computer architecture, databases. And there are Calculus, Algebra, Probability. The same three disciplines that made me get off the train twenty years ago, waiting for me exactly where I left them. This time I don’t get to be a nineteen-year-old, and I don’t get the excuse of having no time either, because time is short now and it was short then too.

Today, though, I’m just a freshman with an empty transcript. It had been a while since I stood at the beginning of something, and I’d forgotten what it feels like.

Last modified on 2025-09-02