In honor of the long weekend, here are some college career memories of a recent graduate.
It was great, although it didn't go quite she like planned.
She went into the Fall 2003 semester knowing her roommate... she had met her at a VIP day event, another homeschooler with a similar background. So that was a pleasant start. Within the first two weeks she had a job of 20-some hours weekly in the cafeteria. It was a normal year, except for the spring '04 blip where her father went on the transplant list in February.
The second year started out normally with an upgrade in jobs - working in the library and the Language Department. By the time she went home for fall break, her Daddy was in the hospital with his heart failing. Before going back to school, she offered to come home, and so she withdrew from Grace for the spring '05 semester to relieve her Grandpa and Grandma from Iowa homestead duty.
The semester home and summer were absolutely wonderful. One month was just herself and eight of her siblings taking care of themselves. The rest was being all together, finishing up the year-long Spanish and German textbooks and working on the house. She was particularly proud of the hundreds of nails and screws that finally secured the garage roof beams. Her older sister graduated and landed a posh job, which made her even prouder.
Fall '05 was back to school and back to both jobs. Spring '05 was off to the great study abroad adventure which she'd never actually believed would happen. She had started the triple language major knowing that she wanted to study languages, not study abroad. Those semesters abroad proved one thing - if a home schooled country girl homebody could go study in France and Argentina, anyone could do almost anything. (After most of the year abroad, she contemplated finding a way to require every U.S. college student to spend a minimum of three months overseas in order to graduate.)
In 2007 she returned for one more semester at school, ending up with three nice positions - the sole assistant at the Language Department, an ESL instructional assistant at the high school, and a babysitter. She was especially proud of that last one. However, the number of lines filled in her day planner convinced her that humans were not meant to live on full schedules.
There were several exciting times in that memorable last semester, such as when they declared her four credits short of graduating, or informed her after graduation that her loan repayment grace period had been used up during the semester off. But a little help quickly cleared these details away.
So there it went. A B.A. in seven semesters, five of them on campus. Only 2 Bs in her entire college career.
Now there are a couple of ways to list college career accomplishments. Some people would write up all the honors, awards, and participations.
But, when asked, she provided the following two:
-The semester home - an opportunity to help her family and get her student mothering/household-running experience
-The two semesters abroad - opportunities to study in France and Argentina, meet new people, and add more dimensions to life
She did say that if she could do it over again in an ideal world, she would concentrate solely on studies, thinking, and discussions, with absolutely no work or participations of any kind.
[The author, somewhat tired of talking about herself, begs you to excuse her for writing this up in the third person.]
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