I've been fooling myself all these years

True confession time: I wasn't a very good student in college. I've been going along all these years thinking I wasn't great, but I wasn't bad, either. Truth be told, I was pretty bad. Don't tell my children.

I'm afraid I didn't take the academic part of my college education very seriously. My apologies, Mom and Dad. I should have paid more attention to my studies than I did to being the consummate party animal, at least during my first two years. Junior and senior year I spent more time working on the college newspaper, and that's what saved my butt.

In my youth-inspired arrogance, I applied to three of the top journalism schools and all three of them turned me down. I can remember sitting in a rapidly-cooling bathtub, contemplating drowning myself over the humiliation. And then I hatched a plan. I wrote an irate letter to the school to which my academically minded boyfriend had been admitted pointing out to them that I had spent much more time working on and running a newspaper than doing school work and that they should admit me based on that criterion. Then I went to my academic advisor and made the same argument to him. Dear Dr. Stevens agreed and volunteered to write a supporting letter to the master's program to which I was seeking admission.

What arrogance! What hubris! What audacity! What luck!

They bought it and I was in.

I was a much better graduate student than undergraduate student. I managed to accrued a grade point average for my master's program slightly north of a 3.0.

I need to remember that I once had such audacity and try to recapture it as I move forward. I'm in close to the last chapter of my working life and I need to be confident, bold and imaginative, just as I was sitting in that bathtub wondering how I could make the future work for myself in a way that I chose.