Senioritis is killing me, but freedom looms ahead

By |

EL PASO — I’m suffering from a compilation of excitement, regret, anger, laziness, and nostalgia, but I don’t need a shrink. My ailment is called senioritis and all I need to get better is to graduate. I’m fully aware that I suffer from senioritis, but not because I’m skipping class or getting lower grades. Neither of those have occurred so I’m in the clear in that category, but I’ve just been dragging along these past few months for several reasons.Excitement: Like every other senior, I am pumped to be able to say, “I’m a college graduate” in a few months. After four years (okay, I lied, 6 years) of all-nighters studying (with Facebook and Netflix study breaks), group projects (where you end up doing 90% of the work and everyone else gets your well-deserved A), and subjecting your body to fast-food so you can even find time to eat (which you eventually learn to enjoy), you deserve that diploma.Me personally, I love knowing that once I get home from work, I won’t have to worry about checking Blackboard and that I can re-watch Dexter from the beginning in peace, without feeling like I’m not accomplishing anything.

Attire ready for graduation day. (Elliot Torres/Borderzine.com)

A long-winded retrospective on a long-winded college experience

By |

EL PASO – I can’t help thinking about Doogie Howser, M.D. For those of you who never saw it, Doogie Howser was a show starring Neil Patrick Harris (before he became NPH of Harold & Kumar fame) about a teenage genius that became a talented surgeon. Every episode ended with him typing on a computer about what life lessons he’d learned during that week’s episode. So, here I sit, looking at a blinking cursor trying to find a way to wrap up my college career as a whole. I began way back in 2001 at El Paso Community College where I finished my basic courses and moved on to the University of Texas at El Paso in 2009. Like many other students, I have worked my way through college, there were years I did not attend school and I switched majors, twice.

With my youngest daughter at a field trip. (Photo courtesy of Francis Regalado)

My college degree is in sight despite all the obstacles

By |

EL PASO – Ever since high school, I was categorized as one of the students who could never get a college degree, but now I am only months away from earning my diploma at the University of Texas at El Paso, part of the first generation in my family to graduate from college. In high school they had two kinds of plans, the advanced and the general plan. The advanced plan was for those students identified as college material and the general plan was for those students tagged only as high school graduates. My first D in geometry prompted the counselors to switch me to the general plan. Although they said I could still attend college, they pulled me out of geometry and put me in consumer math, which was an interesting class but not a class I feel I really needed.