 how to get a bachelor's of science in cloud computing in as little as six months. That's what we're going to be talking about in today's video and these tips that I'm going to be sharing with you sound unbelievable, but it's actually possible to do it. And this is at a top 10% regionally accredited industry-respected university. Now, there are a handful of universities that you can actually use these tactics and strategies that I'm going to recommend in this video. But the particular one that I'm going to be using for an example in this video is going to be WGU or Western Governors University. Now, the reason you can get a legit bachelor's degree at WGU is because of the fact that it is a competency-based university. And the difference between a competency-based university or a competency-based education model and traditional university is you get to test out of classes based off of your competency. So at a traditional university, you tend to have to spend at least four years to get your bachelor's degree. And in the United States of America, it's actually 5.1 years on average. However, at a competency-based university, if you want to knock out classes a little bit faster, especially some of the easier ones that everybody has to take anyways, you can do that. And there are countless testimonials on Reddit, across the internet, on different forums, as well as YouTube, of other people that have done these exact processes that I am going to describe in this video. And until recently, I haven't revealed my exact strategies and tactics that I have used to help people get degrees in less than a year. But that all changed with this series because you guys asked me to make it. And so I decided to do it. So I'm going to drop a ridiculous amount of value for you. And if you appreciate that, go ahead, gently tap the like button, and let's jump into it. Now, I'm going to mention really quickly that there are three different cloud computing tracks that you can take. There is the Azure track, the AWS track, which is the Amazon Web Systems track. And then there is the multi cloud track. And the multi cloud track is very similar to the cloud computing degree that WGU has been offering for several years now. Many would say it's a slightly better and easier version of that degree. So definitely do your research on which one you'd like to take. But in this particular case, I am going to be talking about the multi cloud degree. So this is going to be a four step process. And you want to make sure you follow each of the steps exactly as I say them. Now, the reason for this is I have seen many instances where people try to skip a step, and they end up costing themselves thousands of dollars, as well as months or even years of time. So I highly recommend you follow these steps exactly as I say them. The very first step is you're going to go ahead and transfer in your existing credits. Now, this sounds easy enough, right? You've got some existing credits, you just, you know, send your transcript in and that's it. And at normal universities, this would be a very easy process because normal universities don't accept that many credits. But WGU is a bit different. They are very gracious about the credits they accept. So I'm going to tell you a few of the things that they accept, and I probably am not even mentioning everything. So you definitely want to check with your counselor. Now, not only do they accept the usual stuff like credit from other universities, and they're very gracious with that because sometimes colleges can be pretty stingy with that. But on top of that, they also accept AP and IB classes that you might have taken during high school. And I have seen instances where other colleges will only accept an AP exam if you scored a perfect five on it, which is absolutely ridiculous. But WGU doesn't tend to be like that. Now on top of that, in many cases, they accept certificates and certifications. They accept military experience, work experience, and they even accept certain classes that you may have taken on online platforms. So for instance, if you've taken some classes on Udemy about cloud computing, there's a chance they might accept those. So again, this is one of those things that's a work in progress, they change it all the time. Definitely check with your counselor on this. But make sure you get your transcript, all your work experience, all the certificates and certifications that you've gotten, get all that together and send it into your counselor. And then they will go ahead and send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. And at this point, you are going to move on to step number two. And this is the most important step. And that is you are going to go ahead and knock out a bunch of the classes using third party companies. So I like to call this the test out phase, because you're going to be testing out of a bunch of classes before you even enroll in WGU using these third party companies like study.com, Sophia.org, and straighterline.com. Now, my favorite one is study.com. And that's basically what I focused on with the cheat sheet, because I didn't want to confuse people. But Sophia.org in many cases is really good as well. I'd say they're my second favorite. And then straighterline can be great for certain classes. Now, sometimes people get really scientific with this, and they'll say, you know, I'm going to take four classes from straighterline, three classes from Sophia.org and another seven classes from study.com. And if you want to go into the weeds, save yourself a few hours here and there. Maybe you can do that as well. But I personally like to just keep things simple. Now, the reason you are going to be using these third party companies rather than just enrolling in WGU is very simply because it's faster, cheaper, and easier. So those are three really good reasons how fast you might ask. Well, there are students of mine that have reported to me that they are able to knock out multiple classes in a single day. But if you're super busy, you've got kids, you've got a family, a full time job, totally understand, you can still very easily knock out one class per week, especially the entry level ones. Now, one class per week, you'd have to take 37 total courses to get this degree. You can do the math there. Now, obviously you can't knock all of the courses out using study.com as well as these third party companies, but you can do a significant amount of them. And you can see exactly how many you can knock out by checking out the cheat sheet, which I will put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. This cheat sheet is going to make this entire process ridiculously easy. And here in a few minutes, I'm actually going to jump into it and show you exactly how to do this. And here's a screenshot of somebody who finished a cloud computing degree in one semester. So after you have taken all these classes, you've transferred them in, they're going to go ahead and send you back the remaining classes that you still have to take. And this is when you're going to move on to step number three, which is you are going to pre-study the remaining courses, right? So you are not enrolling in WGU at this point, your enrollment counselor might be kind of pushing you a little bit to enroll. And, you know, that kind of makes sense because they want you to enroll so that you give them more money essentially, but you don't want to do that yet. You definitely want to do step number three. And this is the step where I see a lot of people skipping. And I highly recommend you don't skip it. I recommend that you do pre-study the remaining courses. And the reason for that is quite simply because you pay per term. And each term is six months. And it costs around $3,500 to $4,000 depending on the degree you're taking. So you want to have a plan where you know that you can knock out that degree in either one or two terms. You don't want to be in a situation where you have, you know, a few weeks left, but you've got like five classes to take. And you either have to stress yourself out taking those classes. Or in many cases, you end up missing the mark. And then you have to pay for an entire another term, right? Because if you're even a week or a month into another term, you still have to pay for it. Unfortunately. Now there's really only two resources that you need to pre-study for these classes. The first resource is going to be the WGU subreddits and they have a subreddit for every single degree track. The second resource is the WGU Facebook groups. And either of them are great. It's kind of whichever one you prefer. I would actually recommend doing both. And they're going to essentially share tips, tricks, strategies, and tactics on how to study for these classes and pass the tests as efficiently as possible. So really during this phase, first of all, you want to make a realistic plan of approximately how fast you can pass the exams. Now, if you are trying to do this really quickly, you're probably going to aim for being enrolled for just one term. And if you're trying to kind of take your time a little bit because you're really busy, full-time job, family, et cetera, you can probably aim for either two or three terms. That's still a heck of a lot faster than 5.1 years on average to get a bachelor's degree. But once you have a really good plan, once you feel confident about your studying, and you think you can pass the test relatively easy, at this point, you do want to move on to step number four, which is you are going to enroll in WGU and knock out the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can. So this one is pretty self-explanatory. You're going to talk to your counselor, you're going to enroll in WGU, and you are going to start taking those classes quickly. Definitely make sure to leverage your professors, your mentor at WGU. Also, make sure to check back on the Facebook group as well as the WGU subreddits. Those are going to help you out a lot. And then just knock it out as fast as you can. Make sure you have a study plan. Make sure you're disciplined and you're doing it every single day, even if it's just for 30 minutes. Watch other WGU or, you know, accelerated or competency-based university videos that you see posted on YouTube for motivation. And then just do the work, finish it, and you're going to be proud of yourself when you finish. Now, let's go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet. And I'm going to take you through this entire process step by step. All right. So we are currently in the cheat sheet, and I'm just going to kind of take you through this really quickly. This is basically just one sheet out of a giant master sheet that my friend Josh and I created for all of the different degree tracks at WGU. That master sheet, I believe, is linked in my WGU video. So you can find that there. But with that being said, this sheet will be down below. The difference between this sheet and the master sheet is you can actually make a copy of this one, whereas the master sheet, you can't because we have to update it. So speaking of making a copy, if you want to follow through these steps for yourself and like fill in your own classes and your own experience, all you got to do is go to file and then make a copy. And it's all yours. The only downside to making a copy is you will not be able to get updates if we update this sheet. So for instance, we were thinking about including the Sophia classes as well. And we may do that in the future. If you make a copy, you're obviously not going to see that when we update it. So check back on this sheet from time to time and see if we do that. Now I'm going to go ahead and take you through all of these kind of step by step. So on the far left here, you have the class IDs. The reason why this is so useful is because in the WGU subreddits as well as the Facebook groups, oftentimes instead of just typing out the entire class name, they will just use the class ID. So, you know, for instance, if you're looking up applied probability and statistics, if you're looking up like how to pass this class really quickly or something along those lines, you might want to just copy the ID and then search the WGU subreddit or the Facebook group. And there's probably a bunch of people that have already talked about that class. Now moving along here, this column right here is going to be the class names for WGU, right? So these are all the classes that you have to take if you want to get the cloud computing multi-track degree. The next column is going to be the amount of units in each class. And then the next column is probably the most important one. And these are the classes that you can actually take at study.com that transfer in for WGU credit. So just to make this very simple and clear, if you take statistics 101 at study.com, which the number is 0068 SDCM 0068, that's another thing that in some cases you may search on the subreddits or the Facebook groups and that might pop up. But if you take this class, it will transfer in for applied probability and statistics at WGU. And moving along here, there are a few classes here and there in some cases where Sophia.org or in some cases with other degrees straighter line might offer a class that study.com doesn't offer. And in that case, we put that there and you can just go ahead and go to their website and look up the class number, and it should be there. So for some reason, study.com does not offer a web development foundations degree, but Sophia.org does. And then this column right here is pretty awesome as well. So these are the different certificates and certifications that will transfer in for these different classes. So that's really useful as well. And then the final column, basically, it just shows what type of class it is. So these green ones are general education, the yellow ones are core, and the red ones are program specific. And then of course, this one at the very bottom is the capstone that you take at the very end. And very generally speaking, this is not always true. The green ones are the easiest, the yellow ones are medium difficulty, and the red ones are the hardest. But like I said before, that's not always true. All right, so let's go ahead and go through the four step process step by step. So I'm going to basically just make this up. I'm going to use an example. Let's say you, you know, had a few classes you took during high school, a few AP classes. So you took AP math, you took AP biology, and so you were able to transfer in to WGU. And then you also took one semester at a community college. And so you were able to transfer in communications and economics as well. And then you also got all of these certificates and certifications because you knew you were going to have to know this stuff anyways, and you would probably need the certificates and certifications. So you decided to get them. So you would go ahead, transfer all those in, send all of your, you know, information to the counselor, and they would send you back a list that looks something like this with the ones that are not crossed out, essentially, the next step, step number two is you are going to go ahead and take as many classes as you can using third party companies. So all of these classes right here that you see, you know, in this column right here, as well as this one from Sophia, you can actually take them using third party companies and it's faster, cheaper, and easier. And so in this particular case, you can see there are a ton of classes that you can take and transfer in. So you'd go ahead transfer those in. And you would get a list back from your enrollment counselor that looks very similar to this. So as you can see, there's about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine classes that you still have to take. So you were able to transfer in about 75% of the classes before you even start. And at this point, you would move on to step number three. So you're not actually going to enroll yet, you are going to pre study the remaining classes. And on top of pre studying, you're going to want to make a plan to try to graduate in whatever period of time you are comfortable with. So if you're really busy, maybe it's two or three terms. And if you want to do it really quickly, this is very realistic for you to knock this out in one term, especially if you pre-study. Now, if you're super busy, I do understand, you know, if for whatever reason, you just want to get enrolled with it, I do understand not studying some of the easier ones, but you definitely want to pre study the harder classes highly, highly recommend it. And then once you feel confident, you have a really good plan. And you know that you can graduate in a certain amount of time. Step number four is you are going to enroll in WGU and knock these remaining classes out as fast as you possibly can. So this is where it gets exciting because you get to knock the classes out. And then once you do, you get your bachelor's degree. And at this point, you're going to move on to step five, which is brag to your family and friends that you were able to knock out a degree in, you know, maybe six months, maybe 12 months, maybe 18 months max, they're going to all think you're a genius. And if you're really nice, you'll share this video with them so that they can do the exact same thing. Now, one thing I do want to say quickly is this is a phenomenal option for a ton of people that I have worked with in the past, but it's not for everybody. There are pros and cons to going to a university like this. There's never anything in life that only has pros. There's always going to be cons. But with that being said, this has a lot of pros and not that many cons. But I do recommend you check this video out right here because I'm going to go over the pros and cons of WGU, as well as alternative universities that might be a little bit better for you.