A Grateful Graduate

On Monday night I walked out of my very last final at the University of Washington, Bothell. I paused for a few minutes just to stare down the stairwell, surprised by the magnitude of my feelings. A long three and a half years ago I had resumed my journey towards a college degree, after having taken a long hiatus from college. Hundreds of hours of classroom time, group work, reading, studying, coding, writing, and generally scrambling, and now suddenly it was all over. Assuming I hadn't unexpectedly flunked anything, I had earned my Bachelor's of Science in Computing and Software Systems.

Beyond the feelings of accomplishment, relief, and even a twinge of sadness to see the end of another phase of my life, my strongest feeling was gratitude. Make no mistake -- I had worked incredibly hard to earn this degree, while trying to still do good work at my job and be a good family man. But there are any number of ways in which this mission could have been far more difficult or even impossible. Without a supportive, flexible employer to make the afternoon school hours possible, state funding and federally backed loans to make the financial side workable, and a great school with a degree relevant to my career just ten minutes drive from my home, earning a degree would have been an unworkable puzzle. If my wife (who also worked full time and finished her degree during this period) was less patient, our family dysfunctional, our friends and neighbors less helpful, or our other life circumstances slightly different, this would have been a miserable endeavor.

It is only a wealth of good luck that made it possible to get to this point. I hope that I can take what I have earned and give back to those who helped me earn it.

In closing, I want to say that after the attention to last week's post, I had been trying to think of something interesting to post related to Cynefin. In fact, all week I have been adding to a list of possible post topics, related to Cynefin and otherwise. But with the holiday madness I haven't had time to put together anything too serious, and that will probably be true for another week or two. In the meantime, my gratitude is the most profound thing I could write about this week, even if slightly off topic. Happy Holidays!