Graduation

Wow - my lack of posting here shows how busy I've been since Spring Break. It seems I had nothing but non-stop projects, assignments, papers, and (of course) final exams over the last month and a half. The stress was seriously wearing me done - and I'm fairly sure it was dragging on Kate as well. In the last couple of weeks before finals, it felt like I was doing nothing but heading into the computer lab between class and work. And during finals week, I never stopped going through my notes and texts.

But it was worth it. I am now officially a graduate of Colorado State University with a degree in Computer Science.

I'm done. :-)

I'd like to thank the Academy...no, wrong speech. I do need to thank my friends and family for all their support and faith through the last couple years. If I'd been trying to do this all by myself, I don't know if I would have had the stamina to keep pushing on without so many people believing in me. And naturally at the top of the list is my wife Kate - who put up with my stress, my panic, my pessimism, my frustration...everything...and never once offered me anything less than total and absolute confidence in my ability to reach my goal. This degree belongs half to her - I would never have made it this far without her.

Thanks, sweetie.

My mother was good enough to take a number of pictures of the weekend, including the graduation ceremony and the party that Kate organized for later that day.

Graduation ceremony
Graduation party

And of course the question I'll be getting from here on out will be: "What are you going to do now?"

Well, I'm going to continue working at the local library for the moment. I'll be cleaning up and updating my resume as well. I'm going to sign up with websites like Monster.com and Dice to look for technical jobs. I've also got a long list of companies that I've made tentative contact with at career fairs - I'm going to blanket all of them with my resume. I'm going to take advantage of CSU's career center for some assistance. My sister-in-law Aileen suggested the Colorado Nonprofit website - since I'm a little keen on staying with the public service industry. I'm hoping to find something to do with system and network administration. However, I think I'd also be willing to try some sort of entry-level programming or software development as well. I'd also prefer to stay here in Fort Collins as well, but if nothing crops up in the next couple of months, I might broaden my search.

I guess we'll just see what's out there.

In the meantime, between working at the library as normal, I'm hoping to brush up on my skills by self-teaching myself a few new things. There are tons of "Teach yourself XYZ" books out there - I think I'll take advantage of my library in this fashion. I've got a couple books already on network troubleshooting and Java. I think I'd like to teach myself some more about C#, Perl, ASP, .NET, php, and visual langauges - all to make myself more marketable. Plus, it fills in the time while I'm actually searching for work - beats just playing Playstation games all day.

(Okay, actually playing computer games would probably be a bit more fun, but this would be more productive.) :-)

So that's the big news for today. I've missed a dozen other events that occured since Spring Break because I was too busy to post. Maybe now I'll be able to devote a little more brainpower to this blog and our webpage and have a bit more to show for it.

Thanks for reading...and thanks to all of you who helped me accomplish my goal. I owe it all to you.