Pointers

Day 9: Earlier in the week, I scheduled an appointment with the assistant director of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). The plan was to review my transcript to get a better idea of where I stand so as to better plan a path to graduation. I had a look at my unofficial transcript before the meeting just to have an idea of what I'd be working with.

It wasn't pretty.

My eyes scanned over an alphabet soup of near and outright failures. It was painful. And embarrassing. And frustrating. I remembered all the bad choices and missed opportunities and felt a rush of guilt and regret. I read and reread my transcript, as if subsequent reading would somehow change my grades or, at least, make me feel better.

I wanted to apologize to someone, but had only wronged myself.

And, as easy as it would be to hang my failure on personal problems, it would do me no good to say, "I was wrestling with some pretty big life issues at the time" or anything to that effect. The grades were what they were, regardless of how I came by them. It didn't matter how I got into this hole. It mattered how I was going to climb out.

I went in to the meeting discouraged and embarrassed in advance.

"This isn't nearly as bad as you think."

He was reviewing my transcript, reading and rereading it as I had, only with a completely different look on his face. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was smiling. I misread his expression as sarcasm and shifted uncomfortably in my seat, unamused.

Over the next hour, he very calmly and patiently put things into perspective. In the end, it turned out that I was not nearly as bad off as I thought I was. In fact, I was in pretty good shape. As we reviewed my transcript together, I found myself wondering what it was that I had been looking at before.

To be sure, I do have some work to do, but not NEARLY as much as I first thought. In fact, so long as I do well from now on, I'll be in good shape to graduate with a decent GPA (which would put me in decent shape for grad school).

So. Hooray!

I drove home feeling especially encouraged. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. Up until now, I was expecting a much more difficult fight. All it took was an informed outsider's perspective to show that, perhaps, I'm not as far behind as I though.

If I'm being totally honest, I anticipated graduating dragging my wheezing bleeding GPA behind me. I figured that, no matter how well I did, I'd be in for the fight of my life. But maybe I was wrong.

Maybe this whole adventure isn't as impossible and hopeless as I first believed.