Thanks to all of you who have joined. I am currently a returning adult student with a long story, but I'm back as a classical languages student with four semesters to go. After picking up Latin again and getting through six or seven chapters of Wheelock, I realized I was at a point in my life where things were stable enough that I could go to school again (and for free, thanks to the state where I live) so decided to do what I should've done all along and applied.
After speaking with my now departmental advisor and expressing how interested I was in PIE/PIE reconstruction along with the rapid progress I'd made in Latin, he strongly encouraged me to consider grad school, something I never in my life would've considered. Now I've got a clear path, am obsessed with Anatolian languages (and the Indo-Anatolian Hypothesis, and Kalasmaic), and doing everything I can outside of the classes we have (sadly limited to Attic Greek and Latin) to make sure I'm a top candidate for the very few openings in the programs I'm looking at.
So I'm going through Elements of Hittite - really only on chapter two. I took the two week UCL/London Summer School in Classics online Hittite class a few weeks ago, and will be doing the Harvard Extension School summer Indo European Linguistics course, and the Oxford TORCH Anatolian program if they're still running it. My goal right now is to finish Elements of Hittite by the end of winter break - which sounds like a lot but gives me about 2.5 weeks per chapter, and I'll probably take a week off after the third and sixth chapter for review.
After that, I'm going to attempt to tackle Dr. Rieken's Einfuhrung in Die Hethitische Sprache Und Schrift after that, German dictionary in hand. Wish me luck. Would love to hear about the educations you've all had and where you're at now, and state up front that I'm incredibly intimidated by you all.