Graduation

Wow. I picked up my graduation cap and gown at the Holt Arena today. They had all the chairs for the graduates set up, and there was a team of people ironing the flags for each of the colleges, and the lines were freshly painted on the turf... that's when it hit me. I'm graduating. I've been going to school for 4 years, soaking information up like a sponge and leaking it onto paper every 4 weeks or so. It's been what they told me to learn, and now they're going to give me a piece of paper that says that I did what they wanted me to do. I gave them 4 years of my life. It better be worth it.

I have to be honest. One of the things I've most been looking forward to for the last 4 years is answering "Bachelor's degree" on the education level question they always ask in the Harris Poll surveys... Until now, it's always been "Some college." I answered "Bachelor's" for the first time last week. I figured I'm close enough... for all intensive purposes, I have my degree. I'm a big person now. I have a full-time job, with benefits after 90 days... paying twice as much as I'm making right now. I'm okay with that. I got the job last week and started training on Tuesday, but why didn't that help drive it home? I'm making plans to take classes in the fall and then get into the Master's program in the spring, but that didn't really hit me either...

It's just another step in my life. It just seems like such a natural transition. Go to high school, graduate, get a job. Go to college, graduate, get a job. Go to grad school, graduate, get a job. I don't think that the whole high school graduation thing hit me until I had started school and was probably about halfway through the semester. I can't pinpoint an exact instance, because I don't think it was anything big. I think it was something like I was walking down the street and looking at all the buildings and people and my whole new lifestyle and it just hit me - I'm in college. I'm on my own. I'm a big person now.

But I realized today, and I haven't even finished yet. My next final is this morning. Then I'm "done" with finals. Not really, because you have finals in grad school... so that's not really a big deal. I have a new job, but it doesn't seem like anything that you have to be super-qualified to do, so it just seems like another summer job. I ordered my graduation materials and there's going to be a little party for me, but I've been too busy to think about what that all means. But today, when I walked into the Holt Arena, and imagined myself standing there with my family and friends watching, and when I walked across that soft, fake turf and found the package with my name written on it, and when I bought myself a little souvenir tassel and switched it out with my old high school tassel, it became something real. It's going to happen. In 2 days. I have 2 paper links left from my original chain of 260+. I put my high school tassel away... I don't belong to Hillcrest anymore. I belong to ISU. I am now going to be recognized as a product of ISU. I'm no longer just "a college student." I'm a college graduate. Not to say that I haven't thought about that already, but I've been pretty used to my identity as a typical college student. My new identity is that of a college graduate. I didn't flunk out. I didn't just barely scrape by. I don't have thousands of dollars in student loans. I'm going on to grad school. Some might venture to call me responsible... Let's not fool ourselves though...