Graduation

My undergraduate career is over. It's a strange feeling. I realized the other day that I have been in school for 75% of my lifetime which means I am bound for some sort of identity crisis when I finally realize that this is it. It may not hit me until late August when everyone is buying school supplies and I am headed to work. Hopefully. I'll probably make my way to a few office supply stores and pick up a new notepad or two for old time's sake. There's nothing like the first stroke of a new pen in a new notebook.

It's the little nerdy things like this that ensure me that I'll go to grad school. I'm a knowledge junkie. I thought it would be months before I picked up a book again, but I bought a collection of short stories today, and I have a box of books that I want to try to read this summer. We'll see if I get to them. As of now my goals are to get a tan and catch up on all the Grey's Anatomy episodes I missed while I was up all night writing papers.

Ed and I are on a post-graduation vacation right now with my Erin :) and our friend Liz--the coolest sophomore I know. We're staying with Erin's brother and sister-in-law and relaxing a bit before we jump right into the real world.

It has all been rather anticlimactic. The end was such a whirlwind that I have barely had time to process it all. I handed in my last paper at 12:00pm on Friday, worked at the coffee shop for the last time, received my honors and processed around the church, said goodbye to my friends, and walked across the stage on Saturday morning. It was all over in one 24-hour period. I'm still catching my breath.

Mainly, I'm trying not to regret my undergraduate experience. I don't believe in regrets. I think they are a waste of time. Everything you experience teaches you something. But that's tough to remember when I think about how I went to a small, conservative, private Christian college in southern Michigan and nearly every day since the beginning of my sophomore year I have second-guessed that decision. But I was locked in. The credits wouldn't completely transfer, I was getting decent scholarships, I had met Edward and I didn't want to leave him, and I had a couple close friends and a couple professors that I really didn't want to leave behind.

Now that all this is over and I'm facing astronomical loan debt (thanks Love) and a degree from a no-name no-clout nowhere university, I have to remind myself how different I would be without those people. By and large I hated the institution. I hated the way they tried to control every facet of my life and did not allow me to make my own decisions. I hated the way they focused on God more than academics and still claimed to be a university. I hated the way the sheltered little kids would walk to class barefoot and play nerf guns on the plaza outside the library.

But I love my husband. I love my friends (here is where I shout out to Erin, Monica, and my new-found Katie). I feel privileged to have learned from Brent Cline, Dennis Garn, Jen Letherer, and others. And I know that I have had opportunities in theatre and at the school paper that I would not have had at a larger university. When I get down about my debt and my future I think about those things.







It really hit home during the graduation ceremony while Abby and Dan were singing "How He Loves Us." I was fighting sleep and trying to listen to lyrics and I caught this line: "And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,/ I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,/ When I think about the way He loves us."

I am not a fan of most of the schmoozy Jesus stuff that goes on at Spring Arbor, but that lyric caught my attention. There are more productive things, more important things to dwell on. I am better for the people that I met at that hundred-thousand-dollar high school and I guess (though it pains me to admit it) if I could do it all again, I'd make many of the same decisions (though maybe I would have told Ed to drop out when I saw those loan totals getting higher and higher...)