(This was written a while back and then taken down because I wrote the wrong percentage and felt like a dork…)
People who think this is a first world problem need to calm down. Imagine working your brain to maximum capacity for over two years, only to find out you are .03% away from graduating with honors. This feels like a load of this and that, as well as bull with another word closely attached.
How is it possible to make almost all A’s, a few B’s, zero C’s, and not graduate as an honor student? Howwwww? After working this hard, graduating as a basic college student from Le Cordon Bleu is something this student will not do.
Why would anyone smile who has a B? Please begin frowning now. There’s no reason to smile. Hold your head down and frown. I went to Le Cordon Bleu yesterday to turn in my externship paperwork. This was the first week of my externship and I’ve been happily working in a restaurant all week long. This happy-ora surrounding my vibe quickly disappeared the second I sat down in none other than the externship director’s office chair.
Just when it seemed like a regular day, she told me I was .03% away from graduating with honors. This is like telling a baby it can’t go home with its mom and dad from the hospital, which is tragic. A person could have slapped me twenty times instead and that would have been better than being told I’d graduate as a basic graduate.
Sure, you might be thinking I earned what I earned and fighting cancer for a full year doesn’t matter. You are absolutely correct. It’s too bad it took longer than two minutes to figure this out during the fateful day that was actually yesterday. My brain decided to tell my eyes to shoot liquid down my face as fast as possibly possible after exiting the externship director’s sad, lonely, cold depressing office. It wasn’t actually cold, but it should have been.
I couldn’t walk fast enough to the registrar’s door. “How is it possible I’m graduating .03% away from honors? HOW?” She was quite polite as she walked me through the obvious. Leaving there meant sitting in the car feeling sorry for myself for a few minutes. I called my mom since she graduated college with a 3.9 instead of the much preferred 4.0. She is the one person who could relate with my feelings of total culinary school inadequacy topped off with a little not-good-enough-for-a-graduation-cord-or-two. If I don’t have that cord there’s no point in walking the line. Why embarrass myself with nothing swinging atop my embroidered chef coat? This graduation explosion of sadness is not working out for anyone over here.
The only solution is to retake one of the classes where I earned a sadly basic B. The class I am choosing to take again is Baking & Pastry. Making a B in this class was ridiculous. I loved everything about this class, so why the B? I actually was sick a few times which could have made the .03% difference, but it’s still all my deal. I was in charge of my grade.
This is all about earning honors, not being given. I will happily go back for six weeks and bake since graduation is in January. I have to convince them to let me take the class while on externship. They will say yes because it’s the right thing to do. Baking & Pastry will feel dreamy compared to the last time I took the class with tin foil thieves, pen clickers, and lazy culinary students. This time Baking & Pastry will be the bomb, which will force an ultimate honors graduation to become reality. Please & thanks & have a nice day.