I’ll be graduating from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in less than a week. I’ve finished all my classes and I don’t have to take any finals, so this next week will be spent doing development work for clients and just relaxing.

While I’m excited about being done, a little part of me is really going to miss this school. I’ve made friends with so many people and I’ve learned so many things over the years. Every year has been good, but this year has been great for me. In this post, I’d like to share why that is.

Major Life Events

Many, many things happened over the course of the year that were life-changing in some way. The most important, at least in my opinion, is my engagement to my wonderful fiancee, Angela. While not much has changed practically, yet, there is a sense now that the course my life is going to take is a little more determined. That’s exciting to me.

I’ve also decided that my career will probably take a more entrepreneurial route. This was a decision that was a long time in coming and was partly decided by the fact that I don’t want to “work for the man.” I plan on doing a lot of contract development over the next couple of years and I have a bunch of different product ideas that I’m working on considering the feasibility and market for.

All About the People

I’ve lived in the same beautiful residence hall the last 3 years. Unfortunately, it has established a reputation as the “lame” hall that students should stay away from at all costs. Luckily, through a decided lack of residence hall space, we ended up with a great group of guys in my hall this year and I was able to make fast friends.

I’ve met so many people this year that I’m happy to call friends. They’re wild, wacky, studious, entertaining, mumbly, and sometimes even slightly fat. In spite of their differing qualities, though, all my friends are nice guys are heart. From our resident giant leprechaun to our experienced backpack occupant, all my hall mates were amazing guys. I’d like to extend my gratitude to my awesome RA, Justin for helping to bring us together through IM sports and other activities.

Of course, I’ve tried to keep up with my friends from the past, too. It’s hard, here at Rose-Hulman, to keep in contact with all the people that you’d like to over the years. Sometimes, it’s like you’re being pulled in a million different directions at once and if you don’t see someone in a class it’s hard to remain friends.

I’m happy to say, though, that I’ve been able to keep a friendship over the years that I made back when I was a sophomore. Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep in contact over the years as she heads to grad school and I move to Seattle.

Classes

As is normal here at Rose-Hulman, most of my time this year was spent in classes and doing homework for those classes. I feel that I’ve been blessed this year to have classes that I thought were interesting, challenging, and fun (for the most part.)

I learned how to design and implement a microprocessor and instruction set. I learned about XML databases and more about process and documentation that I ever thought I would learn in a formal setting. Straying from my technical education, I also had the chance to partake in a mock presidential election. I got to take my turn playing the media and writing biased news reports on our candidates.

In all, I enjoyed my classes this year, but I’m glad I won’t have to go to anymore. About 2/3 of the way through the year, I developed a great deal of apathy for actually going to my classes. I missed more class sessions this year than I did in the 3 previous years combined. I just felt that the classes weren’t worth my time when I could be doing other things and teaching myself new skills and technologies.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to summarize an entire school year in one post. I love it here at Rose, but I’m happy to be moving on to (hopefully) bigger and better things. My classes and experiences here have taught me so much, and my gratitude toward the faculty, staff, and other students is immeasurable. I can only hope that I can take the education I’ve received and use it to transform my life and, possibly, transform the world.