 In today's video, we're going to be going over how you can get a health information management degree in as little as six months. And you're going to be able to do this by going to a school called WGU, also known as Western Governors University. Now Western Governors University, for those of you who don't know, is a competency-based school. This basically means that instead of you having to go through all those classes, doing all those projects, and basically having to go to college for on average 5.1 years in order to get your bachelor's degree, if you are competent in the subject, they make it very easy for you to test out of it. And they do this in a variety of different methods, which I will go over in this video. Now there are several different terminologies I've heard for this. Some people call it degree hacking, but basically some people take this to an extreme, and they're able to graduate with an entire bachelor's degree from a school like WGU in as little as two months, like my friend, Josh Matacor did, with the hardest degree at WGU, which is computer science. And there are certain strategies and tactics that until I did this series were so valuable that I only shared them with my private consulting clients, but I decided to just basically give up all of my secrets and put it all on this YouTube series. So if you appreciate me giving you all this value, go ahead, gently tap that like button, and let's jump into it. Now by the way, this might also be referred to as a BS in health information management, and I actually created a cheat sheet for you that is going to make this entire process insanely easy. And I will link that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So you can look at that and follow along while you're going through this video. So the first step that you want to do is you want to take an inventory of all of the different credits that you already have, and you'll probably be surprised at how many credits you can transfer in. The reason for this is because WGU is very gracious with the types of credits that they allow to be transferred in. So for instance, you can get credits from work experience, military experience, certificates and certifications that you've taken, high school classes like AP or IB. And of course, if you already have some college experience, like maybe you took a semester or two at a community college, you can transfer that in as well. Now if you have any questions about what you can and cannot transfer in, definitely contact the counselor, but definitely take your time on this step because you will be surprised at some of the stuff that you can actually transfer in. So once you have your transcript available, go ahead, send it into WGU, and they will send you a list of the classes that you still have to take after that point. And at this point, you want to move on to step two, which is use third party companies in order to test out of the remaining classes. Now I highly recommend using these three companies. The first one, which is the one I recommend the most is study.com. The second one is straighterline. And the third one is Sophia.org. All three of these companies are great. The one that Josh and I have had the best experience with, with the students that we've taught, has been study.com. They seem to be the most consistent. People have generally good experiences with them and they seem to be a little bit on the easier side typically. But basically most of the classes that you would have to take at WGU to get your degree can be taken on study.com instead. And the advantage to this is study.com is faster, cheaper, and it's typically going to be easier than the classes that you would take at WGU. So it is definitely to your advantage to take these classes using study.com straighterline or Sophia. Now looking at the cheat sheet that I gave you, you can save 30% off your first three months if you use study.com. I believe the coupon code is Shane Hummis. So if you appreciate all this hard work that we put into creating this resource for you and you want to help out the channel a little bit, go ahead and use that coupon code at checkout and you'll also save some money. So after you have tested out of all those classes using study.com, Sophia.org and straighterline, then you're going to go ahead and transfer all those classes and then move on to step three, which is you want to pre-study or pre-game the remaining classes, right? So you might have somewhere between five and 15 classes remaining that you still have to take and you want to go ahead and pre-study those classes. You can do this through a variety of different methods, but I think the easiest way to figure out the most efficient way for you to study depending on the course you're taking, the class you're taking, and the test you're trying to test out of is going to be to go to the WGU subreddit. And there is a main WGU subreddit, but usually there's also another subreddit for the specific degree. So you want to go find that subreddit and then see what everybody else is doing because people will typically share their strategies and tactics for testing out of these classes as fast as possible. And in many cases, they'll recommend a great resource for you to pre-study the class and then go ahead and pass that test as fast as you can. Now, one thing I want to note is you have not enrolled in WGU at this point. The enrollment counselor may be sort of pressuring you to enroll and that's kind of their job, right? Because the more time that you're in WGU, the more money they're going to make. But it's in your best interest to actually test out of these classes using these third party companies because like I said before, it's faster, cheaper, and easier. And it's also in your best interest to pre-study these classes so that you can finish at WGU, aka the time you're actually enrolled, as fast as possible. So at this point, once you feel confident that you are going to be able to pass these tests and get through these classes really fast, you're going to move on to step four, which is you want to enroll in WGU and then knock these tests out as fast as possible, right? So you're going to go through these classes, do the training and then take the tests and try to get through them as fast as you can. And the reason for this is because WGU basically charges you per term and one term is going to be six months. So if you really take this seriously and you use these strategies, you could very likely graduate from WGU in one term. And if you're super busy, maybe it'll take you two terms to graduate. So that would be somewhere between six months to one year of actually being enrolled, aka actually paying for college. And that's a heck of a lot better than the national average, which is 5.1 years. So there's lots of stories online of people, you know, speed running or degree hacking, and they're able to finish the degree extremely fast. But for a normal typical person who maybe already has a job, they already have a family, they're busy. I still think it's realistic to set a goal of finishing in two years or less. And that includes all of the pre-studying, all of the certifications you're taking, taking the third party companies, classes, et cetera. And that's still a heck of a lot better than 5.1 years. So now we're going to go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet. And I'm going to take you through step by step exactly how you could do this. All right. So this is the cheat sheet. And I'll just go ahead and kind of walk you through this really quickly. So the ID right here, this is going to be the, you know, the class ID at WGU, it makes it a lot easier to look up. The course name is basically the class name at WGU. And this is how many units each course is going to be. And of course, I have linked it up specifically to study.com classes, right. So, you know, for this course right here, writing with a strategy, if you take this class on study.com, then you would be able to test out of that course. Now I also made it very easy for you to find the class on study.com. So if you just hover over that and then click this, it will take you to the study.com class. Also for whatever reason, if study.com doesn't have the class, we will try to keep this up to date and make sure we include it on Straterline or Sophia. So for instance, you know, introduction to pharmacology, farm 103, you can take that one on straterline.com as well. So by the way, you can just go ahead and do file and make a copy if you want to do this for yourself. And I recommend that you do that. But if you want to go through these steps yourself and use this as kind of a reference to make everything super easy, just go ahead and make a copy of it. So we'll go ahead and start off with step number one, which is you want to transfer in existing classes. So in this particular case, again, I'm just making this up. But let's say you took AP math in high school, you also took AP biology. So you're able to test out of those two classes. On top of that, you did one semester of community college. So you're also able to test out of communications, art, and math. So you would go ahead and transfer those classes into WGU. Now for the health related degrees, there are less classes that you can transfer in for some of the like business and technology degrees, you can transfer a ton of classes in, but not quite as good for the health related degrees, but still pretty good. So once you transferred those classes in, you would move on to the next phase, which is testing out. And again, not as many classes you can test out of, but you can still test out of a decent amount of them. So you would, you know, test out of all these classes using study.com as well as straighter line, and it probably wouldn't take you too long to do that because there's not that many classes to test out of. And for this particular degree, there are no certificates that you can use at least at this time. But again, we might update it in the future. So make sure you check back. So in this particular case, these are the classes that you have remaining. So a little bit more than half of the classes you still have remaining. So you'd want to move on to the pre studying phase. So you'd basically want to pre study for these classes as much as you can. And again, I would definitely check out the WGU subreddits in order to figure out the most up to date and best strategies to do so. And then once you feel confident about that, you would go ahead and move on to the phase where you actually enroll in WGU phase four, and you start taking the classes as fast as you possibly can. So you'd want to take these classes and knock them out as fast as possible. Now, of course, there are those people who take it super seriously, and they're able to graduate from WGU and ridiculously short periods of time, like my friend Josh Madicor, who was able to get a computer science degree in two months because he, you know, really took it seriously. And he was actually trying to like set a record, I think. But for a normal person, the time that it takes for you to finish it in terms of the time you are enrolled in WGU will probably be one to two terms if you take it, you know, semi seriously, and you have a decent amount of time and maybe even longer if you are a really busy grown up with a family and a full-time job, etc. And realistically, if you're a busy grown up with a full-time job and a family, etc. I still think you could probably aim for getting done with this degree in two to two and a half years, which is a heck of a lot better than 5.1 years on average. I highly recommend checking this WGU video out right here, because WGU is really good for certain types of people, but it's not for everyone. So definitely check that video out. There's also alternative colleges that I talk about in that video that are really good alternatives to WGU in case you want to get a different degree or something along those lines.