Diploma

In many ways, it is a big deal, but not for most people. I finally got my BS diploma. Being that I'm thirty and I started going to college when I was seventeen means it took about thirteen years for me to graduate, but I did.

The last round took me a little over two years, when I was working at PRLH and they gave me a little discount. I got fired after the first quarter or so. I tried to ask for some help, to get the money to get through college, but my mother wasn't capable of producing it (though she would promise she would) and my father... well, he basically said that he didn't think I would go through with it and hinted that I've bad enough bad choices. And no money. So, I got somewhat annoyed at myself for even trying to ask him and got a student loan to cover college. I also did it as night school, working 2-3 days a week after work, so it took a very long time.

I managed to petition out of half of my classes, just because I've already done it. Two of the eight petitions were "prove you know Java" so I sent them about a quarter million lines of working Java code. Did a pretty good job of proving it. The others were harder, but after more than twenty years of small businesses, programming, administration, and everything else you do in a small company, it really wasn't a challenge. The challenge was actually finishing, standing up and saying "I finish it."

So, I'm proud of myself. It isn't a bouncy excitement of my first novel getting published or the euphoria that I got when I asked Fluffy to marry me, but it is a deep, almost profound pride that I finished something that I started, despite the trials and struggles.