Well this was pretty cool, I have to admit...
A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from the Dean of GRCC inviting me to attend a banquet to honor the top 5% of the graduating class of 2011. I was asked, in turn, to invite either a professor or a member of staff that had somehow been influential to me during my time at school. I was also able to invite up to 4 other guests, being either family or friends.
Unfortunately none of my family is here!... but it didn't take me too long to decide on my friends, or a professor either. And it sounded like a fun night, and I felt truly, truly honored to have been invited to be a part of it.
I have to interject here that I seriously could have had no idea that this would ever happen when I walked into that first French class on that evening of September 13th 2001, after nearly 25 years of being out of school. To be honest, I really had no idea what I was even doing there that first night back to school!... and I didn't learn a heck of a lot of French that first night anyway. (<-- that might take a moment...) I don't think there could be anything more overwhelming than staring down at that frightening list of classes you know you're going to have to take just in order to get to the place where you
should have been at when you were 20.. Particularly when you're 46 and working full time... Which also brings to mind the fact that, at 46, you typically don't go back to school just to "get a degree"... like it's going to have any real major impact on any future prospects or anything. I think maybe you do it then because you finally realize that you just really want to finally do it!. And if you're going to do it, you might as well do it WELL. Because otherwise, well, what's the point? Really. So yeah... that was pretty much me.
So anyway, back to the banquet... I was just really looking forward to a nice dinner (catered by the Culinary Arts department which is rated +++++) and spending a great evening with my friends. But about 5 minutes after sitting down, my guest Professor Pat Higgins, who I'd invited, mentioned to me that she thought it had been a tradition in the past for all of the "honorees" to be given an opportunity to speak during the program as to each of their unique experiences at GRCC.
*panics!*
You're um, joking right?...
And then suddenly I remembered how that little silver-haired lady who had once taught me everything I could ever need (or not AT ALL need) to know about Telecommunications... didn't have one possible ounce of "joking" in her...
And so I think that was right about the time that I asked..
"Excuse me, but where's the ladies room?"...
And so yes it was all true. They came and got us, each one at a time, and brought us back to stand in a line to wait our turn to receive our medallion and then to (God forbid)... speak! And there was really no way to get out of it. Trapped, in other words. And I wondered later why they couldn't have at least (in the invitation or something) to have asked us to prepare a few words or something about what our time at GRCC had meant to us. And then I realized, that if they had, most of us probably wouldn't have wanted to come! So I suppose it takes a college to be smart, I guess.
And to be honest it really wasn't all that bad. I somehow managed to pull something somewhat intelligible out of my hat even though when I was handed the microphone I was still not sure what I was going to say. I babbled on for a minute about how I had stepped into my first class at GRCC two days after 9/11 and how though these 10 years had felt like a really long road I'd be graduating this summer with a degree in Multi-Media Communication Technologies. And then I explained how I had actually switched majors around six years ago because the first one I'd chosen (Communications) would have required me to take
Intro to Public Speaking...So it was pretty easy after that. But here's the really sad part.
I'd brought my camera, but was mostly just planning on using it to take a picture of me and my friends enjoying our nice dinner but then, of course, completely forgot about it. So when Julie grabbed it off the table to try and get some shots, it wasn't at all set appropriately. But I thank her SO much for trying!
I was able to salvage them a little by tossing PhotoShop filter on them, which actually made them appear a lot less blurry than the originals. And though they look sort of "surreal" this way, in truth, that's kind of how the whole evening felt to me to begin with...
From left to right: Olivia Margo Anderson (Chairman Board of Trustees), Steven C. Ender (Dean of GRCC), Me, Fiona Hert (Dean of Workforce Development)...
Here's a picture of the Dean without the PhotoShop filter added...
Me with my Professor, Pat Higgins...
And it was just SO great to have my friends Mel, Renee, Julie and Cheryl with me there as well! Hopefully that picture of all of us taken with Julie's phone will turn out much better than the ones up there. If so, I'll add it here soon!
... Oh well. lol
P.S. Fortunately my camera seems to be working much better this morning...
Front Cover
Back Cover
Honorees
(You may have noticed the asterisks after a few of the honoree's names. That's because they earned a 4.0. I only earned a 3.993, so I wasn't quite deserving of an asterisk : ( Thank-you World Geography class back from 2002...)*sigh*
My medallion, with my book bag as a backdrop.
Wow, it just occurred to me that I had a pin kind of like that back in 1972. Except that it was from Alpha Delta Pi, and was pretty much achieved by just being a good partier...
Anyway, off to study for my final Final...
