With Honors

So, lucky for me, I had the pleasure of being invited to CSUMB’s Honor Convocation this year. Actually, it’s not luck. I earned it. :) I pulled off a 3.5 GPA for my five years at CSUMB and was awarded with cum laude honors. This past Saturday, April 17th, I went to the ceremony to accept my cord. It felt so great to be honored, even if I was one of at least 100 other students. My family wasn’t able to attend and my friends had other obligations but it’s okay. I was only a little bit sad but in the end, I realized that I am the one who worked for my GPA, I should be the first one to support myself in receiving the honors, right? Ha. That was my justification, anyway. I have had so much support over the years as I’ve pursued my college education and that support definitely kept me going but, in the end, the only person who could make it happen was me! I filled out those FAFSAs, I attended all of those classes, I did all the work. I reap the benefits!

It was a surprise to me that I’d pulled it off so receiving the invitation back in March made for a really good day. I’ve been on the Dean’s List for having a 3.5 GPA for 8 semesters out of 10 so I figured I’d done something right. But I thought that to have the cum laude honors, I needed to have that 10 out of 10 record. 8 is good enough, it seems!

I always considered myself to be a pretty mediocre student, even when I was in high school. I don’t consider myself to be that intelligent. I am fairly well educated in my concentration of study, I guess, but I couldn’t bust out an answer to a pre-algebra problem and I definitely can’t list the presidents of the United States or tell you when the Civil War started. I forgot all of that as soon as I left the last class where I’d learned it. Ha.

Despite my lack of confidence in my academic know-how, at CSUMB, I’ve done really well for myself. It feels good to have it all accumulating right before graduation. I feel like I’ve actually made a difference in my own life and I’ve got all the confidence that I need to pursue grad school and, eventually, a really good career. In fact, the research that I’ve done for my capstone has actually inspired me to look into a very different but very rewarding career path. I’ll get into that later. But seriously…

I’m almost done! I did it! Pretty much all by myself too. Actually, I did do it by myself. Nobody else did my homework for me. I didn’t have a clone to go to all of my classes. I singlehandedly wrote my 45 page Capstone paper and did all of the research on my own. I paid for it all by myself. Kind of. Financial aid supported me throughout the entire 5 years. Yeah, so I’m graduating $41 thousand dollars in debt but whatever. It’s worth it.