Advancing Past the Advanced

It is quite amazing how quickly a person can go from not knowing a thing about particular subjects, to in a short time have enough knowledge to hold their own. I spent a long weekend recently attending my sisters wedding. Just introducing and catching up with family members whom I haven't seen or even met since I was a young child. In passing, casual, conversation I began telling my long college career story. It started with graduating high school, and continued to the several college and universities I attended, and ended with my current education process at Keiser University. A few of my cousins and uncles began to heckle me with a few questions regarding graphic design and I suppose a few of my responses surprised them. As it turns out, another distant relative of mine was dating a recent graduate of a design school in Texas. We were introduced and as the conversation carried on, we began debating on fonts, designs, and all sorts of different topics. To my surprise I not only kept up with the conversation, but I feel as though I took over. Quoting different graphic artists and even discussing the documentary "Helvetica" dominated the differences in open and showed that even though I was merely a current student, persuing a 2 year degree, I knew enough to compare myself with a 4 year degree graduate. My family seemed fairly impressed, but not as much as my debater.
Even more recently, I was catching up with a fraternity brother of mine from years back, when we began discussing web design. As it turns out, he had graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in computer sciences, and has been working repairing computer hardware, updating software, and even designing websites from time to time. He told me of the hardships he had experienced in learning HTML and PHP and all the fun internet languages of yesterday and today. I kept up with him pretty decently, and when I told him I have never even read a HTML text page before 3 weeks ago, he was astonished. A profesional, working in the industry, could not believe that only after less then a month of education, that I was at a point of knowing and understanding a few basics in his world.
Sitting back and looking at how far I have advanced in such a short amount of time only makes me more excited to find out what is to come for me. If I can do this much, so quickly, what can more time and experience bring?