Wahoo!

I graduated today! I'm done with school! I have a master's degree! I never thought I would do that!

It's quite amazing to me. When I got my BA I never thought I would ever go back to school. I had some issues about going back -- my track record with higher education is ... not the best. I was quite anxious a lot of the time.

Yet here I am, with my hood and everything:



AWESOME!

Well So Much for That!

So much for Thirty in Thirty! I definitely dropped off a cliff there after taking Comps. Or into a black hole, as it were. Comps themselves were not actually that hard, intellectually, yet I still found them emotionally exhausting. Because they have been drumming into us CopmsCompsComps since before we even got here. SLIS tries so hard to make it seem like this big rite of passage, which it is in a way, but as an actual academic exercise it's not actually that grueling.

The soul-crushing load of homework I have had since then has not helped. I thought this, my final semester, would be a cakewalk. But it has turned out to be my hardest by far.

Hey, if I post ... 26 posts in the next ten hours, I could still make 30 in 30! Heh! Likely? Not.

I may have to go back and add some things, backdated, make myself seem less lame. So if you see me rewriting history, remember, history is written by the victors. And it's my blog, so that means me. :-)

Yay!

The Dean of my library school called me herself today, to let me know that I passed my comprehensive exams with distinction! Yaaaayyy! She said it was unanimous, too -- that all three faculty members on my review committee agreed that my responses were of superior quality.

Oh, I was the only one who passed with distinction, too. The first one in several semesters, apparently, so it's a really big deal. Wow!

(Actually, that feels a little weird. Being the only one. I wish someone else had made it, too. I enjoy being one of a select few. But being singled out like that, being primus inter pares if you will, makes me a little uncomfortable. It fires up my shyness.)

I don't think most people are interested in gaining distinction. "I just want to pass," my classmates say.

But distinction was something I wanted to do. I thought it was within my grasp, so I went for it, and got it. I wanted to prove to myself that I have mastered the material. And so I have.

I don't think "Graduating with Distinction" shows up on my diploma -- but by gosh it's going on my resume!