“…Graduation… A bitter-sweet moment of our life.”

- Leslie Nimfras -

Valedictorian – Batch 2007 AdDU

It’s really well said. Graduation is indeed a joyous moment of a student’s life. It is the achievement of a long awaited and craved goal. It is the fruit of all the hard works and purposeful sweat we have shared and contribute to make a successful impact in our academic life. It is the transition from one phase to another. This is a huge stepping stone that can only occur once in our life. It is from which we will be leaving our training grounds and facing real battles with real people in a real world. Joyous as it is, it also brings bitterness in our hearts. People we get along in our academic stage in life will now be facing each of their own callings and battles. They will pave the path that they have chosen hoping that someday, old friends and acquaintances, to whom they have shared both their achievements and failures, joys and sufferings, meet again in the crossroads of life.

This is really our graduation day, IT4. I have never been so much happy that I have made this far with you guys. But along with my happiness, sadness and longing arises. Impossible things blew in my mind. Will every one of us still be close as we are when we are still in our college days? Will each of us still remember the faces that made us smile and cry, share our joys and tears, our heartaches and heartbeats? I now believe them; people have their own life to walk. They have the chosen course to travel. The blue prints of their career await them. Even though we travel the same road in a moment of our lives, time will come that we have to take different routes and find our success.

IT4, I will never forget you all. I wish each and every one of you the best in life and the success to whatever course you have chosen. I always knew that someday, we will meet again. This is not a goodbye, for goodbyes are only meant to those that we won’t be seeing again. We will see each other again. Maybe 10 years from now, or perhaps 20, you can see me having my son or even an apo, who knows. I just hate goodbyes. But I for us, IT4, this is not yet a goodbye. I will be missing you, each and every person who made up the IT4. Until our paths cross, yours and mine.

“Goodbyes are not forever.
Goodbyes are not the end.
They simply mean I'll miss you
Until we meet again!”

Tonight is a very weird night. There is no thesis. Just a plain academic life. No worries about deadlines. Just a few assignments and reviews for quizzes the next day. A couple of hours to spend over a movie before retiring to bed and sleep peacefully. This is just one of the rare days I get to have. If only there can be more days like this, I would be very comfortable and have a very pleasant environment. Not too much worries. If only.

Yet, things are not what you want them to be. Tomorrow is the day that my adviser will give me the verdict. The final judgment. As if I am a convict waiting for the jury's verdict. I feel the worries gnawing me up to the very bit of molecules or atoms that made up my bones.

35 days to go. The line that stuck in my head after hearing it two days ago from a close friend. 35 days to go and it would all be over. But I asked myself how can I think of the 35th day when in fact, I haven't finished my thesis and considering it got a high probability of being dumped, making us start up from the very bottom.

Yes, I considered myself unlucky from the very start of the schoolyear. I never thought this would be this worse or worst. I tried to start my year with a good attitude promising myself that the last schoolyear would be the last time. Hell, and just when I have a good start when things turn against me.

Now, I don't believe anymore in luck. I do believe now that people make their own destiny. Fate got a little percentage of the whole existence of how human reacts in situations and how he brought himself to a particular situation. Its more on how people how people do it. They are the ones who runs their life, not fate nor luck.

Unlucky is me. Is all I can say. yes sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you fall into those category of the unlucky ones. I might be in the latter this time around. But I do wish that before the 35 days run out from me, I have to end up to the former category.