faux-summer

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse with a BA in Rhetoric and Composition a week and a half ago. I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that I'm a college graduate, which sounds suspiciously like real adulthood. Heck, I'm even a member of the UW-L Alumni Association. A college grad at twenty, I feel a very old young; the boyfriend and I argue like an old married couple, my hobbies are decidedly grannyish, and I'm heading off to grad school well before any of my close friends (who are older than me) have graduated, but at the same time, I'm TWENTY. Oftentimes I forget that.

I raced through my undergrad years in 3 years, coming to UW-L from high school with AP and retrocredits. I smashed all sorts of activities into my years here, this past year being the most hectic. I applied to four graduate programs in library science (all with exorbitant application fees and infuriatingly different requirements, naturally). I had an unpaid library internship on campus. I was awarded a grant to complete research on women and the UW-L newspaper, the Racquet - research I presented orally and submitted in writing to UW-L's Journal of Undergraduate Research. Plus I worked 10-15 hours a week, volunteered Sunday evenings at the Writing Center on campus, and sewed pillows for a local women's shelter. Oh yeah, and took 15 credits both semesters... and 3 over J-term. Maybe somewhere in there I had a social life, I can't recall :)

I write all this out now and I have no idea how I stayed sane. If I had the chance to do it over again in 4 years, I cannot imagine how much more I would be able to accomplish, but overall I am proud of my 3 years at UW-L. Beyond pride, though, I'm delighted to finally have a summer at my disposal. You see, graduating in a mere 3 years necessitated that I take summer classes every June/July; I haven't yet had a completely free college summer, so this is it. I'm working 40ish hours a week but nights and weekends are mine alone and I will greedily hoard them!

The boyfriend and I have started settling into the house we're living in over the summer, and the commotion of commencement has waned. Already my days at work, 9-6, are a blur. The weather hasn't been humid and sticky yet so it still feels like a strange interim period, a faux-summer, an impostor. This blog is part of my plan to keep myself organized and engaged during this time of odd uprootedness in my life.