So, the people who actually bother to check and read this blog despite the fact that it's almost never updated on time (or at all for long periods of time because I'm terrible at this) may have noticed that over the past few days, there's been a short little post about the discontinuation of this blog. The reason for that was, up until around 4 PM yesterday, I had been under the impression that due to two less-than-great grades and a missing class credit, I had not graduated and would likely have another three semesters of college to do. Now, there are a lot of reasons why that wouldn't have been okay, but the primary few were that I'd already been in college longer than expected due to my struggles with math, and going back would mean becoming a taxing financial burden on my parents as well as cutting into money that was intended for my youngest brother's college fund.
And he really needs that college fund. I'm not going to sugar coat things here, the school I attended isn't exactly prestigious. It's a good school, don't get me wrong, it's just not exactly something your families boast about at fancy dinner parties (assuming your family has anything to do with fancy dinner parties- I'm mostly working under assumptions made through watching television and reading terrible fiction). My youngest brother, however, is well on his way to attending Texas A&M, which is a real school with real prestige and lots of real opportunities. Now, it may just be a bit of a black-and-white analysis of the situation, but having to explain to him that we were going to have a bit of trouble getting him through the school he wants (and deserves) to go to because his older brother took six and a half years to finish a four-year degree doesn't exactly seem fair to me. And as you can imagine, the idea that this particular scenario was about to become reality was kind of a crippling shot to my self esteem's kidneys.
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, though. All of this started about four or five days ago when, while opening up my college email account so that I could request letters of recommendation from some former professors, I stumbled across an email that didn't look friendly. The email was titled "Final Graduation Status" and was particularly worrying for two reasons. Apart from the nagging red flag that had been in the back of my mind since I saw that my name wasn't listed in the roster of the graduating class of 2013, I also hadn't received my degree yet, or any kind of notification from the school at all. I opened the email to find the following message:
"A
DEGREE FOR SPRING 2013 WILL NOT BE POSTED TO YOUR TRANSCRIPT. A FINAL
REVIEW OF YOUR ACADEMIC
RECORD WAS COMPLETED AND YOUR DEGREE REQUIREMENTS HAD NOT BEEN MET. ALL
GRADES (TRANSFER/CORRESPONDENCE/SHSU) WERE DUE IN THE REGISTRAR’S
OFFICE BY MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013. YOU DID NOT MEET THE REQUIRMENTS BY
THIS DEADLINE DATE. YOU CAN CHECK YOUR GRADUATION
STATUS BY GOING TO DEGREE WORKS VIA MY SAM AND THE STUDENT TAB."
When I first read through this message, the actual wording of the email didn't even register in my head. Instead, the only thing that my eyes read were big angry words that said "YOU DIDN'T GRADUATE BECAUSE YOU FAILED." This wasn't even slightly helped by the fact that whoever had composed this message had deemed it necessary to unleash the internet fury by pressing the Caps Lock button.
My mental faculties responded to the contents of this email by going into all-out panicking ragemode. I immediately decided that there had to be some kind of mistake, even though I knew there probably wasn't. After raging for a bit, I followed the instructions in the email and found that according to DegreeWorks, the new degree plan software used by the college, I had made grades in two difficult classes that weren't considered passing, and one required class that I had just never even taken.
So, here's a fun fact about me: I have high expectations of myself, and when I fail at things, it seriously damages my opinion of myself (which, as you may be able to tell from reading other posts in this blog, isn't very high to begin with). I may not be a superstar straight-A "4.0-all-the-way-through-life" student, but I'm fairly sure that if I were, I'd have stressed myself into an aneurism by now. I'm not an anal perfectionist, but I am a good student. During my academic career, I made plenty of A's, but I also made enough B's to open an apiary (google that if you don't get it) and enough C's to shoot a Victoria's Secret commercial. D's, however, were something I didn't make many of. In fact, I'm fairly sure that in both my dual-credit high school courses and my years of University classes, excluding the math courses my brain is physically incapable of passing (I have paperwork to prove this), I made a grand total of three D's. And I was never just "okay" with that. I tried to act like I was because it made things less stressful for me, but D's taste like failure. The only thing that made those D's tolerable in my mind was that they were in very difficult classes, one of which has about an 85% first-try failure rate (and I'm not even joking, that's what the professor starts the class by telling you), and because I was told by my academic adviser that a D was still passing.
As you might imagine, then, staring at a web page that told me those D's were in fact not passing, and that I had just straight up missed an entire class I should have taken, it didn't feel good. It felt like life was saying, "Oh by the way, you know those failures that you were pretending were okay so that you could continue to exist with some false peace of mind? Well now they really are failures, and so are you, because you failed college."
I really don't feel the need to go into the exact details of what happened over the next few days, but suffice it to say that I was not in a good place. I closed down my Facebook and my Blog, because as you can probably imagine it's kind of hard to be sociable or funny when you feel like your stupid mistakes have ruined everything. It basically became that part of every romantic comedy ever where the music gets all slow and sentimental, and the characters are all mad at each other because someone did something stupid, and it spends far too long showing off how much everything sucks with lots of dramatic "staring woefully into the distance with close-ups" shots.
Then yesterday I drove up to my apartment so that I could beg the management to let me keep it a bit longer, despite having said I wasn't going to renew my lease. While putting in an application at the local IHOP, I realized something. All the courses in question were not attached to my major, which was completed. They were all attached to my minor. After some consideration, I decided that the best course of action would then be to go to the school and cut my minor off like a malignant tumor and just deal with not having one. I headed up to the college and sat down to have a talk with the head of the English department, who also happened to be my academic adviser. And I learned a few things.
First of all, it's required to have a minor in order to graduate from the university, which wasn't great for my plan. However, she was just as confused as I was as to why I didn't graduate. We pulled up my records on DegreeWorks, and we found a few things out. First of all, I was remembering correctly and those two D's were supposed to be passing. DegreeWorks just didn't realize that, so it marked them down as incomplete. Furthermore, we realized that the reason I had a class that was completely unaccounted for was because I had taken an entirely different class to substitute for that credit, because the class in question hadn't been offered that semester and it would have prevented me from graduating on time. DegreeWorks, however, just took that class and plugged it into a completely unrelated area of my degree plan, and left the other course as an incomplete credit.
After all that, it turned out I was supposed to have graduated. I had spent the last several days in a state of mental and emotional wreckage...
...because of a system error.
In the end, I did graduate. And I will receive my degree, as I originally should have. Just leave it to the wonders of computer software to completely destroy a guy's life for a few days.
Thanks, technology.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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