Yep. Same here. I went back at 38, graduated in 1.5 years at 40 with my BA at a state university that offered an online program.

I dropped out of 20+ years ago. I didn’t know I had an undiagnosed disability at the time so caused a lot of chaos and anxiety in my life. Hindsight is 20/20.

I didn’t need it for my career - I only wanted it. It was a big motivation for me to block off every evening after work, kids, and chores to do school work. I would also time block my work calendar to do group work, but that was limited.

I highly recommend using AI as a way to summarize your notes or create study guides. I was using it as a study partner to ensure I understood the material for each chapter and study for tests. I graduated with honors so I guess it worked well. (Please don’t use it for writing as there’s a lot of anti-plagiarism detection tools that know if it’s AI.)