University—Like Life—Is What You Make Of It: Graduation Day

I have recently gone through a major change in my life—I am no longer a student, in the traditional sense of the word. My university career is over for now. This is an especially strange feeling because it’s almost fall, and I can’t help but feel like something is missing.

Being a student, there is a sense of the passage of time, and accomplishment. Knowing that classes start at the same time of year every September and January helped to regulate my year. And even if I hadn’t made any particularly great strides in my personal life, I’d accomplished something significant in passing a semester of classes.

This is a particularly strange feeling because part of the reason why I had wanted to move here from Calgary was to go back to school, and now that it’s over I’m going to move back again. Really, I can’t help but feel like I’m returning with my head hung low.

If university really is what you make of it, then have I failed or succeeded in making it what I needed it to be for me? The decision to go back to school again was an interesting one considering that it was something that I never thought I could possibly do, nor thought I wanted to do. Nevertheless, I kept going, despite all the intense stress on myself and my family—and at the end of it all, on May25th I walked away with my diploma in hand.

Being a mature student, I didn’t do a lot of the things that other students were doing, or that I imagined them doing—going to sports games, joining sororities, constantly partying.  I also had to work throughout my university career and didn’t live on campus. Being at a different stage in my life made it more difficult to make friends, but luckily Greg was also at the same school.

I attended the University of British Columbia here in Vancouver, a massive school with a massive campus, too a far from the main city. After many changes and altered ideas of what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to get a degree in art history, with a minor in First Nations studies. What do I want to do with my degree? Well, I could do a great many things, like work in different cultural institutes, but as for what I am actually going to do—you’ll just have to follow this blog to find out!

Are you or your children going back to school? Do you have someone close to you that recently finished school, or graduated from an important grade?