My Final Semester

I should go back to school and I know it. I never intended to stop after the bachelor's degree. But, I can't think about school without thinking about my last semester in college.

My last semester was a nightmare for several reasons.

1. I was on my stupid three-year plan. In order to pull off the plan, I had to complete 32 hours this semester. Nine of those hours were simply paying for the CLEP hours I had already earned, so it's not as bad as it sounds. The rest of those hours were real classes, though! It was all upper-division stuff, including my departmental honors project.
   
2. Shawn had to go off and get married. It was good for Shawn, but it crapped up my world quite a bit. Good ol' Olivet assigned me a roommate that was a poor fit for me, to say the least. Dan, my new roommate, was a 22-year-old freshman taking 12 hours that semester. Don't get me wrong, Dan was and is a good guy, but we were just living in different worlds. At some points I just wanted to kill him, or at least the morons that put him in my room.
   
3. There was some planning involved in that idiot marriage of mine.
4. I was paying for this crap. Of course, I'm the genius who had to go to an expensive private school without any help. That was bad enough, but taking all those hours made it even more expensive than normal. Add to that the idiot wedding, the idiot car payment...
   
5. I was hell-bent on opening doors to my future. It wasn't enough that I earn my bachelor's degree, or that I earn it in just three years. No, I had to make sure I was all set to go to grad school when I got done. Dang it, nobody was going to limit my options, either! I would be totally pissed off if I got rejected by one of the crappy grad schools I had in mind--like Harvard.
   
6. If that wasn't enough to screw up a perfectly good semester of college, there was also the looming reality. I had to get a job when I was done with all this.

Well, long story short, I did it. I sometimes went two or three days without sleeping, but I did it. For the most part I got the results I wanted, too. I suffered a few A-minuses, but I got the departmental honors and the impressive GPA. I graduated on Saturday and started my new job on Monday. We had the idiot wedding the next month.

I won! There are many victories far worse than defeat.

It's been seven years. I should probably be over it by now, huh?