When this posts, I will, for all intents and purposes, be a graduate of Western Michigan University and of the Haworth College of Business with a Bachelors degree in Management and Business.
It’s been a long time coming.
Realistically, I started college the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, all the way back in the summer of 1992. I took an Economics class that counted as dual enrollment so I received credit for both high school and college. Fittingly, today I took my last final exam in my last undergraduate class, an Economics class called Price Theory, so the world comes full circle.
What a strange, strange ride it has been…
I got a bug in me when I was younger to experience something else, something different than what I was “supposed” to do. I think part of it was my way of saying, “I don’t have to do it just the way you say, and I’ll prove it!” While my closest friends were moving to campuses around the country to work on their degrees, putting their livers to good use, finding out about the Freshman 15/40 and the Walk of Shame; I was working in hospitalities and doing “well” for myself while going to school part time. It wasn’t long before “dollar” was more important than “degree” for me, and school was put on hold.
Later, after a few of them had completed their degrees, I moved away. I don’t believe I’ve ever said this to anyone, but I was scared to death that I wouldn’t be able to do it, that I wasn’t going to be able to handle being that far from everything, from everyone, I’d ever known. I was strangely at the age where I thought people would find me “too young” to do what I was doing and “too old” to not be doing something. I was utterly petrified that I would come home before I was “supposed to” because I couldn’t hang, or that I didn’t belong. But I didn’t come home, I stayed and I loved it, and I was good at it. School, college at least, was at the back of my mind. It could wait until I wanted it to. It would wait until I was ready, not a minute sooner.
In the past I’ve said that during that time away, I truly believe I got my education. Granted, it wasn’t theory or formula, and there wasn’t an exam over the material covered, but I still learned. I found out more about who I was than I ever thought there was to know. Now, looking back, I think what a naive statement to make at the age of 24. But when I said it, and every time I’ve said it since, I meant it. Was I wrong? No, I don’t believe so, but today at 31, the only thing I know for sure, is that I’ll never know it all, that I’m always going to be learning, always be growing and revising what I know, and that that’s okay.
While the Type A in me is driven to madness by the fact that I can’t always make things happen the way I want them to, the rest of me is content with experiencing life, not trying to control it and certainly not wanting just to endure it. Life is a zero-sum game, you come in with nothing and you leave with nothing. So to me, it only makes sense that the stuff you do in the interim is what matters. It’s time I started making something of the interim, and that is part of what this degree is, a piece of that something in the interim. Something I can be proud of.
So just what will the rest of that be? I have no idea. None. I really, really don’t. But I do know this:
Perspective is a great thing because now, as opposed to 10 years ago, I can see that no matter the situation, someone else’s “Up’s” aren’t as high as they look, and your own “Down’s” aren’t as low as they feel. There will always be someone better than you at something, and while it may not be comfortable all the time, only when it stops you from trying, when it stops me from doing, only then will I fail.
I guess what I’m saying is there’s no way I could have seen how this has all played out in the nearly half of my life that it has taken, and I would have laughed at anyone who might have told me this is how it would go and somehow guessed right… but getting here, with all of you, family, friends, co-workers, those I’ve lost contact with, those I love dearly and those I hope to never ever see again, all of you have been with me, getting here. It’s meant a great deal. In some instances you’ve nudged me to keep me on the right path and in others you’ve inspired me by showing me precisely what not to do… but for the most part, you always let me be me.
Thank You.
Now… what do you say we open this baby up and see what it can do?!
KSH
I'm Such a Child 