So when I began this looooong journey called Graduate School, I remember thinking to myself "I'm not going to get involved". My intention was to go to class, come home, do homework, and not let the world of academia permeate me. I don't know why I had this thought. Perhaps it was the extreme worldliness of all my classmates that turned me off. Perhaps it was being out of the bubble of HPU that made me feel insecure. I have never really felt "smart". I am good at school and can follow directions to a T. I never really excelled though. That was always left up to Mike and Sarah. They graduated Cum Laude and with honors, and I was more excited about my new graduation dress then I was about my GPA.

My campus puts on a student conference every year. Partly as a recruiting tool, partly as a chance to let student showcase their work. Last year I thought "I'm not that good of a writer to submit a paper" but this year my thesis advisor said he required it of all his students to submit a paper. My friend Tammy, also an advisee of this professor, wrote a paper together last fall, so we pulled it out of oblivion and submitted it to fulfill that requirement. Imagine our surprise when this past Wednesday I got an email stating that our paper was accepted to be on the Top Graduate Paper Panel! What? MY paper? Heck no...you must be mistaken!

Low and behold, when I opened the attachment that had the conference schedule, there was my name, one of four chosen for the panel. Now, we didn't win the top paper award, but we did present our paper to a room of about 100 professors and students from schools all around Texas, and I won't lie....I felt a bit prideful and proud at my accomplishment. But more importantly, I felt like I belonged with that group. Most of the people in my classes are Teaching Assistants. They are up on campus all day every day,have close friendships and call the professors by funny nicknames. I go once a week and have only really made friends with two people. At the conference, people knew who I was, lots of them said Hi to me, and I was introduced by my advisor to a few professors from UT, TSU, and SMU. Wow....I was an academic. People actually took seriously something I wrote. I was shocked and a little taken aback.

At the end of the conference, my professor from last semester whose class I wrote the paper for came up to Tammy and I and said "Your paper was one of the best in the class, and probably one of the best I have read as a graduate professor. We need to keep it moving!" She wanted permission to tweak it a little and try to get it published. We of course gave her the go ahead, and I left feeling like maybe, just maybe, the world of academia actually fit me.