This Worldschooled Kid Just Graduated! Booyah.

I almost skipped out on the graduation ceremony because I thought there wasn’t much point.

Let’s be real, school had wrapped up a couple of months before graduation, I had already celebrated with a trip to the NOLS Jazz Fest, and I was ready to be out of there. It was a good four years, and it was over. Time to move on. Right?

Wrong.

As it turns out, I’m only the third Miller (my dad’s side) to graduate university and apparently it was kind of a big deal. So I got tickets for friends and family, paid an exorbitant fee for photos, cap, and gown, and got up early on the day of convocation to put makeup on and go.

And then the ceremony blew me away.

I’m so glad I went. The magnitude of it all hadn’t hit me. I was 100% taking the experience for granted in my excitement to get back out there and find new adventures.

As friend after friend shuffled into our muster room, I started to reflect on my four years at Queen’s. How frustrated I was with the first year culture at first. Finding my feet as an independent adult. Picking up on a whim and moving to the Netherlands for a year to study from their perspective. All the late night lectures with my Booster Juice on hand. The great people I’ve met at every stage. So many fantastic humans have put energy into my time at Queen’s and made it extraordinary, from profs to admin to fellow students.

When the time came, we shuffled out the door and practically ran down the street to Grant Hall, where I had my first year prom. The excitement was unbelievable. We took our seats (I promptly lost and refound my call card) and the ceremony began. To be honest, it was a bit cultish – we had to say “I do” and make forever vows to the great institution of education – but it was also reflective.

My education to this point has been such an adventure, and a wildly collaborative project. My parents are clearly the most responsible, but everyone I’ve met along the way has been a teacher. Even some of my readers have directly contributed to my education. University has been just one small part of my ongoing learning process, but it’s still a pretty cool achievement. When I think about the 20 year scope of the project, all I can feel is gratitude.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks to Queen’s University for the opportunity to access teachers, materials, resources, and experiences I couldn’t have found any other way. I’m grateful for the chance to have studied abroad, done an internship in Guatemala’s main research library, and connected with so many inspiring professionals. I’m also glad to have studied remote sensing – something I realistically couldn’t have accessed outside of the traditional classroom.

Thanks to my parents, for setting me up to have the experiences, know-how, and transcript to get all of this together. And thanks to all the folks who hosted me on my travels, who taught me useful skills, who encouraged me to never give up, who helped foster a love of learning.

It’s been a wild ride.