College Algebra
College Algebra was a ten-week general-education requirement, and I want to be honest about that up front. It was foundational math rather than anything specialized, and the point for me was to knock out a degree requirement while getting my algebra reflexes back after time away from the subject. That said, working through each unit did reconnect a lot of ideas I use loosely in day-to-day technical work, even if I rarely name them.
What the course covered
The arc started with functions and modeling, where I framed a household budget as a set of linear inequalities using the 50/30/20 rule. From there it moved through polynomials and factoring, rational expressions and radicals, and quadratic equations. The quadratic unit was where the discriminant finally clicked for me, since that one value under the radical tells you how many solutions to expect and whether they are real or imaginary before you ever finish solving.
The back half leaned into growth and decay. I modeled how long caffeine lingers in the body using a half-life formula, compared per-use pricing against subscriptions with simple linear models and break-even points, and worked direct and inverse variation through electrical formulas like Ohm's law and P = IV. The final units covered inflation as compound exponential growth and closed on logarithms, including why log scales make data spanning many orders of magnitude readable.
Takeaway
The genuine connection to technical work is smaller than I would like to claim, but it is real. Logarithmic scaling shows up constantly in performance graphs and anything measured across wide ranges, and the break-even analysis is the same math behind a lot of cost decisions in IT. Mostly, though, the value was structural: breaking a messy problem into ordered steps and checking the work before moving on. That habit transfers everywhere.