I believe that every day is a celebration and every day I’m born anew and genuinely try to live every day differently. ~ Rekha

Happiness is Graduation Season

You work in education for one reason, or you should, to help students succeed and achieve their dreams. And this time of year is the time of year where you get to see a lot of that come to fruition, the culmination in one sense is graduation and all of the graduation ceremonies that happen this time of year. Today I participated in the fourth one in the last week. It’s always a really great feeling to see students hit this milestone in their life. It’s great for the young students, but it’s incredibly special for the older students, the ones who came to this process with the most doubts and the greatest amount of fear. They are so incredibly proud of their accomplishment as they should be.

For community college students, and truly a lot of students these days, they are not just in school. They work part or even full-time, they have spouses and children, family obligations, debt. Getting a degree or certificate is a huge commitment and a huge accomplishment. Often they are first generation students, often immigrants and the joy they and their family are experiencing is wonderful to watch. It almost makes up for all of the daily bullshit the rest of the year.

Today is a really fun day for me, three of the programs I oversee are the barbering, cosmetology and esthetics programs. Their final project is what we call showcase, which is, what it sounds like, they set up and showcase their skills and accomplishments, get to show off for the college, family and potential employers. I walk showcase each year, congratulate each of them personally and ask them what’s next? I try and build up their confidence for the license exam and wish them well. Often while I’m doing this I get to meet the families of some of the students I’ve gotten to know and it’s fun to watch their families realize their student knows the dean.

What also happens at showcase is old students come back, so today I got to see a handful of students who I got to know, who are now in the real world trying to make it all workout. Now generally, not always, but generally, the students I get to know are the ones who have had a hard time, either with other students or faculty or just in getting their shit together. So when these students, who we are concerned for, come back and tell us how well they are doing, it’s a true joy. Had a couple of those happen today. Finally today we had an industry advisory board meeting for these programs and an employer was raving about how wonderful one of our former students was, how much success they were having and how much they were impressing people. It was one of the students who I knew very well, a student who had incredible struggles and one I really wasn’t convinced would be successful. To hear how incredibly successful she has been absolutely made not just my day, but my whole semester.

My job often sucks, but it’s days like today when we really get to see why we do this. Hope you have had something equally as rewarding happen recently and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane