 how to get a health services coordination degree in as little as six months, that's gonna be the topic of today's video. And the university that you can do this at is going to be WGU, also known as Western Governors University. Now, this degree is a Bachelor of Science or BS that you can get at WGU. And that college is what's known as a competency-based university. Now, what exactly does that mean? Well, pretty much you can get your degree much faster than at a traditional university if you are competent in those subjects, right? So instead of having to go through those four to six years of university, which it on average does take 5.1 years in the United States of America, if you are competent, if you are the type of person who wants to do extra or do it faster, you can do so. So instead of a traditional university where you have to put the time and dedication in, at least four years typically, they're gonna test you based on how competent you are. And this is why you see reviews of WGU online all the time where people are able to get degrees in a year, a year and a half, even as low as two months, like in the case of my good friend, Josh Matacor. And he was actually able to get the most difficult degree that WGU offers, arguably, which is the computer science degree in two months. Now that, of course, is an extreme example, but I'm basically gonna be teaching the same strategies and tactics that he uses and the same strategies and tactics that I have shared with my private consulting clients in this video, completely free. And Josh and I even worked really hard creating cheat sheets for you to make this entire process insanely easy. And I'm gonna put that cheat sheet down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So if you appreciate this type of video, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it. All right, so we are gonna follow a simple four step model. And by the way, there are two previous steps. I'm just gonna mention this just in case. And those two previous steps are, of course, choosing your degree and then choosing which university that you can go to in order to accelerate your degree. And I assume that you've already checked that out and you've decided that you want to go to WGU and you wanna get this exact degree. But with that being said, there are some WGU alternatives. WGU also has its pros and its cons, which you should definitely weigh. And I did make a video about that, which I'll put right here. But the first step is you want to transfer in all of your existing credits. Now, this step sounds really easy and you're probably wondering, why would you even put that in? Of course, I'm gonna transfer in my existing credits, but I've seen people actually mess up at this step. And the way that they mess up is they don't realize the different types of credits that they can transfer in. And WGU is extremely gracious with the credits that they accept. So for instance, you can transfer in work experience, military experience, certifications and certificates, AP and IB classes that you might have taken in high school, as well as other college classes that you took if you maybe got a degree already or you went to community college for a few semesters. So definitely make sure that you look into all of the stuff that you can transfer in. Now don't worry if you don't have anything to transfer in, that's totally fine. I actually have a better alternative a little bit later on in the video. But yeah, definitely make sure you transfer in everything that you possibly can, get your transcript together, tell the advisor all of your experience, et cetera. And then once you've done that, the advisor is going to send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. And like I said, the cheat sheet down below will look very similar to what they're gonna send you. And in fact, I'd say my spreadsheet's probably a little bit better. But then once you get that list of classes back, you're gonna move on to step two, which is you are going to use third-party companies to test out of many of the remaining classes. And the third-party companies that we recommend that we've had the most good experiences with are study.com, straighterline.com, and Sophia.org. Now our favorite one is study.com. The reason it's our favorite one is because it just seems to be the one that people have the best experiences with. But with that being said, some people get super technical with it and they're like, oh, this straighterline.com class is the best for testing out of this class and this Sophia.org class is the best for testing out of that class. So if you wanna get extremely technical with it, you can kinda like go to the WGU, subreddit, and figure out which ones are the best for testing out of the different classes. But typically, overall, just to keep things simple, study.com does tend to be the best one. Now overall, you do have to take 36 classes to graduate with this degree. And you can very comfortably, especially with the entry-level classes, test out of one class per week. And that's even if you have a full-time job, a family, and you're very busy. Now if you have more time to dedicate to it, many of my students have reported to me that they can test out of like one class per day or in some cases, even like two classes per day. But if you wanna take things slowly, you can do one per week. Now the reason that you use third-party companies rather than just taking the classes at WGU is simply because it's faster, cheaper, and easier. So you wanna test out of as many classes as you possibly can, and then go ahead and transfer them into WGU. And once you've done that, you want to move on to the third step, which is the remaining classes you want to pre-study. Now what exactly do I mean by this? You are gonna have some classes left that you have to take. And before enrolling in WGU, you have not enrolled at this point because the counselor might be kinda pressuring you to enroll, don't do it yet. You want to go ahead and pre-study all of the classes that you're gonna have to take. And the reason for that is because ideally, you want to only be enrolled in WGU for one to two terms. Because at WGU, you pay a flat rate per term. So if you get like 20 classes done in one term, you're gonna pay the exact same amount as if you got one class done. So you wanna knock those tests out and get as many classes done as you possibly can for every term that you were enrolled in WGU. Now the best place to go to look up strategies on how to pre-game or pre-study these different classes is the WGU subreddit. And not only is there a main WGU subreddit, but there's typically going to be a WGU subreddit for all of the different degree types as well. And on there, people will share strategies and tactics on how you can best study for these classes and then take the tests. So definitely leverage that. That can be a great resource for you. But there's also lots of other free resources online. YouTube is great. Khan Academy is great. You can buy a cheap textbook. You can take classes on Udemy. There are many different places that you can go to in order to research this information. Now, if you're not really a Reddit type person, there's also WGU related Facebook groups that you can check out as well. And you can probably talk to people who have already graduated with this degree and ask their opinion on how they would go about studying for the different classes. So once you feel very confident you've pre-studied for all these classes, you do want to go ahead and enroll now and move on to step number four, which is knock out the classes as fast as possible, ideally in one to two terms. Now, bachelor's degrees typically take about 5.1 years on average in order to complete. At WGU, there are countless stories of people who have completed bachelor's degrees in less than two years. And in extreme cases, there's people who have done them in like two months like my friend, Josh Matikor. But of course he did transfer and pre-study and all that sort of thing in order to complete it in that two month period. But yeah, very realistically you can knock out almost all the degrees at WGU if you really focus on it and the full process in about one year. And if you've got a family you're very busy, full-time job, et cetera you can still probably knock it out in two years or less if you really focus on it. Now there are some classes that are gonna be more difficult than others. For instance, the financial resource management, healthcare reimbursement and health service coordination capstone classes are going to be some of the more difficult ones. So definitely leverage, you know, talking to your professor and asking them, you know, how they recommend going about studying for those classes. And then boom, you're done. You graduated with a degree and hopefully two years or less. And in some cases it can be six months or less. Now let's go ahead and go over a step-by-step example of how you can use the cheat sheet to make this whole process insanely easy. All right, so we just jumped into the cheat sheet and let me kind of go over these categories. So this one right here is the ID and that is just a really easy way for you to identify which class it is. Here is the course names and here is the amount of units each course has. And then this column is gonna have the study.com transfers that you can transfer in to substitute for those classes. And if you click on one of these, it will actually take you to the exact study.com class. Also, if study.com doesn't offer the class, we do have alternatives in this particular case. It's just one alternative, which is the straighter line, farm 103 class, which will be able to be substituted for introduction to pharmacology. So let's go ahead and go over the four steps. So step number one, you are going to transfer in existing credits. So let's just say for example, you took AP psychology during high school and then you took one semester of college where you did a sociology class and you completed it. So you would be able to transfer in those two classes, then you would move on to the next phase, which is testing out. And by the way, you can do this for yourself. Just go ahead and go to file and make a copy and you can do all this for yourself. But you would go ahead and you'd take all the classes that you possibly can at study.com and then you would take the farm 103 class at straighter line and then you'd let your counselor know and you would transfer those classes in. So at the end of that process, these are the classes that you would have left. So a little bit more than half of the classes left. And you'd go ahead and start pre-studying all of the remaining classes at this point. So you would leverage the WGU subreddit, Facebook groups and other resources online to study these classes. And then once you felt like you were confident with your knowledge in these classes, you would go ahead and enroll in WGU and you would start knocking these classes out as fast as you possibly can. And ideally with a degree like this, there's not as many classes that you can test out of and transfer in as there is in like technology degrees, for instance, but you can still test out of these classes relatively fast. And I don't think they're as difficult as the technology related classes. So you should realistically, if you pre-studied properly, be able to knock all of these out in one to two terms. Now, Western Governors University overall is a phenomenal choice for a lot of people out there. But with that being said, it is fully remote. It's online. You're not gonna have anybody sort of like getting on you to complete the classes like you would in a traditional college. So it's not for everybody. There's certain things about WGU as well as the other competency-based universities that are just not gonna be great for every single person out there. I don't think there's ever a situation in all of human history where there's one option that is perfect for every single person. But this is a great option for a ton of people that I've consulted with. But with that being said, if you want to determine if this is the right option for you, check out this video I did right here on WGU.