When Will You Graduate

“When will you graduate?”

There it is again, the question of the decade. The question so easy to be answered by anybody yet so hard for me, so hard that it could blow my sanity off. For goodness sake, why don’t you just choose another question such as how much I have learned or what can I do?

I was supposed to graduate last year, batch 2006. I enrolled at Negros Oriental State University (Central Visayas Polytechnic College then) last 2001 after two agonizing years of staying out of school. I took up Secondary Education not that it interested me but because I don’t have any other options in mind when I took the entrance exam. A year after, I shifted to Information Technology (IT) and still not because I found it interesting but because our dean then, left me with no other option. Luckily, IT offered me a terabyte of exciting adventures. I learned about programming, graphics design and desktop puiblishing (courtesy of my affiliations with the school paper and the yearbook and my “Jedi” guru), web design, troubleshooting, computer games, etc. The cyberspace became my niche to the point that the only mobile part of my body are my hands gleefully rested on the mouse and keyboard. Both relaxation and enjoyment for me then, is facing the computer and doing all the things that you can do until your eyes are so tired you succumb to a dumb state they call sleep. I was restless then, restless and obsessed with a companion you can call both a monster and a machine, both you can consider a blessing and a curse. Until I found out how much time I have wasted, so to say, that I realized that the people who were once with me are now ahead of me.

My experience or undertaking with Information Technology as a student was supposed to be a nap as I journey towards success. The nap became a deep sleep creating a gruesome dream, yet I dreaded to end if I wake myself up. So I let myself be carried with my so-called “sleep.” Then the question comes again, “When will I graduate?”

I have no intention to answer that question for I am uncertain of the answer despite the fact that I spent a quarter of a century in this world. But let me justify myself, like an accused being allowed to present evidences to prove his claim of innocence. I have reasons too. First is that I am a self-supporting student. I live by my own, work by my own and study by my own. I have a family, yes, but everybody in our neighborhood, for sure, know that they cannot afford to send me to college, not even to support my allowance or my boarding house rental. There are other guys out there who are in the same situation as mine, but this is different just as everything in this world, as explained by science, is unique. So why I engulfed myself so much with IT instead of keeping focus on the requirements of my course or of my studies is that, I want to learn something, and most importantly, to earn in order to eat something. This is the case of which to feed first, your stomach or your brain. You know my answer. My second and last reason is that God has a plan for everything, not even the smallest event in our lives is an accident or a matter of destiny. As Rick Warren puts it “history is His story.” Now I sound like more of an experienced preacher rather a newbie writer, but I firmly believe this is doing. One of my mentors told me “it’s not God’s will to have you stay seven or probably eight year in college, but rather your will.” Probably, but had I graduated with batch 2006, I wouldn’t have learned any programming language, had I finished earlier, I wouldn’t have encountered this mentor who inspired and guided me to learn a lot about Information Technology. Yes, this is my will, empowered by God’s will.

I don’t know if I could graduate next school year, I even opened myself to the possibility that if I could not, one of my instructors next year could be one of my classmates now. But I’m proud to say that learned something, not just from the books and from the ROMs and RAMs of computer but also from the hearts and minds of people, from our lives. I know somebody (a lot of them I’m sure) will ask me the when-will-you-graduate question again, this time I’m going to answer it:

“March.”