My answer: kind of weird.
The whole day felt kind of surreal in a "wow-I-guess-I'm-an-adult-now" kind of way. My relatives from New Hampshire had to back out at the last minute due to both a medical issue and a rainstorm that left ice on the roads, so it was just the two of us. Joanne and I got there quite early, and she got me a Class of 2015 (yes, you read that right, and no, I'm not) t-shirt and sweatshirt. We parted ways so that I could check in. I met my friends from the College of Engineering upstairs, and we sat together throughout the ceremony.
The commencement ceremony was about two hours long and went without any relative hitches. Nothing really stood out about the event. The speaker was a Malaysian oil pipeline service exec with a BS and MBA from UNH who led his company to the top of the field. The undergraduate student council president talked about Bartels and the graduate student council president talked about Google. The graduates got their degree placards in a single-file motion, stopping before and after the stage for a picture. The end. Afterwards, the graduates filed out together, and then everybody pushed their way out the main doors at once. It took a while for my mother to get out, and I ended up getting separated from my friends.
After a quick visit to a professor, I got my picture taken with Joanne. It had to have been the first time in years that we had our picture together. Looking at it now moves me a bit. It felt like yesterday I was a cool college kid heading to the beach on the mo', and now I've actually become an adult. I looked at my high school graduation photos and compared the two. We've both aged; just noticably, but the changes are there. That was almost five years ago, and it makes me think about just how much life has changed. One of the people in those photos, my grandfather, is now gone. I still miss him, even as the one year anniversary of his death is next week. I know he would have wanted to come. I just wonder if he would've been chewing gum in those photos as well.
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| Me at my high school graduation, 6.24.2011 |
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| Me at my college graduation, 1.16.2016 |
But enough waxing poetic about my family. What about my college life?
Well, it was definitely something. Two bachelors of science degrees with an overall GPA of 2.94. (The CS degree was a 2.85, and the CEn degree a 2.90.) If I had to redo anything, it would be all of sophomore year. I took a laid back, oh-I'm-at-my-dorm-way-off-campus-so-I-can-now-turn-my-brain-off approach to my studies. That did not work out so well for my GPA. I was able to catch up on most of the knowledge as I progressed, but hindsight can only be so useful.
I met a guy at an afterparty for a band I saw the other week, and he was transferring to UNH as a CS major. It felt weird as I was giving advice to him, like we were on some mountaintop overlooking the adjacent prairie, and I had my arm around his shoulder with a large grey beard and was saying in a raspy old man voice, Behold, my son! All of this you see I shall pass unto you. I gave him some advice on what he should do and how. Sometimes I wish I could pass this onto my younger self, about to enter his freshman year of college. Maybe things would be different if I could. But then again, I feel comfortable with the way things are now.
I made plenty of good friends in school, and received generous support from the greatest single working mother in all of history. I've got a bright future ahead of me, as I prepare to take the next leap in my life to go get my master's on the other side of the planet. I tried things, failed at them, tried again, and figured out how to make them just passable, which to my surprise, happens a lot more than expected. Here's to hoping that my master's thesis is a bit easier.
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| A decent quality school, or as the kids like to say, "some good shit right there" |
Thanks for everything, UNH. I'll try to repay the favor someday. Or at least pay it forward. You get the idea.
-wp
