Since I got back from Japan, my life has not been all flowers and sunshine, unfortunately. Especially since the start of my last semester at UT. Since last July I've lost several family members. In January, the night before the semester started, my then boyfriend came straight to my apartment from a three day trip with his parents to dump me. I had such a bad physical reaction to the whole ordeal that it left me nauseated for the rest of the week. Needless to say, I had a really hard time getting to sleep the night before the start of classes. Not only that but that same week Calyn's car got broken into TWICE within four days, just sitting outside of our apartment building. And I could not get into the last Japanese class (I thought) I had to take in order to graduate on time.
The next week I started taking medication for an infection that made me nauseated for the rest of the second week of school. And the professor finally added me to his class.
The classes I took last semester were Fundamentals of Acting (which was a blast), Readings in Pre-modern Japanese Stories (a whole bunch of translating), Main Current of American Culture to 1865 (cultural history), and Mexican American Modernism. I also joined the Texas Ballroom club which was so much fun! During the semester, my acting and ballroom classes as well as my roommates and friends were the only things keeping me afloat.
Two weeks after I was dumped my grandmother died; my last grandparent. I was a pallbearer at her funeral that weekend.
During that time my parents also gave me an ultimatum. If I put out five applications a week and made 10 contact in order to secure a job, they would think about letting me stay with them after I graduated. I know my parents were only trying to light a fire beneath my feet so I could have a job lined up, but that on top of classwork and all of the emotional baggage I was carrying around had me drowning.
Thankfully, things were starting to look up near the end of the semester. I was almost done with my classes, due to graduate soon, and my parents had taken back their ultimatum. On the flip side I hadn't found a job yet.
However, everything hit the fan during the last week of classes. I had turned in all of the paperwork for my coursework overseas in November. I was told that it would all get processed by Spring Break, but it didn't. I was told by my academic advisors that I had all of the credits I would need to graduate on time in May. They finally processed all of my credit the Friday before the last week of classes and I was psyched that I could apply to graduate since the deadline for that was the next Friday.
Well, Monday came around and I went up to campus to apply to graduate only to learn that I was missing one hour of upper-division Japanese credit.
one hour
My advisors scrambled around trying to find ways to correct the situation. They tried having some of the courses re-evaluated, they tried appealing to the Dean to waive the one hour requirement. But by Wednesday nothing had worked and I was really starting to worry. The next day I had three finals, acting at 8:00 AM, a four page translation of a Japanese story due at 9:30 AM, class at 2:00, and an eight page paper due in English at 3:30 that next afternoon. At 5:30 that Wednesday I had halfway finished the translation and I was a page and a half shy on my English paper, when I got a call from my academic advisor.
He told me that if I wanted to graduate on time, my last option was to take an upper-division Japanese final the next day for a class I had not taken at UT. At that point I broke down and called my parents in hysterics. In the end I elected to take the final (which cost $82) and gamble my graduation date on the off-chance that I could pass a final exam whose contents I did not know, nor would I have had the time to study for. The next day, I performed for my acting final and got good comments, ran to the library to finish up the translation for the Japanese class, which made me a bit late. And then I spent my lunch break finishing my English paper before going to class at 2:00, turned in my paper at 3:30 and went straight to the testing site, where I spent 2 hours trying to pass the Japanese final.
The next morning I woke up and found that by some miracle I had made a B on the Japanese final and that I would be able to graduate on time.
So I graduated, and am now back at home in Garland, still trying to find a job.
1 comment:
Freaking. Amazing.
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