You met her when she was 11 — now she’s Little Miss Cal Poly Grad
It’s been a hot sec since you last heard from me in this space.
It appears the last time I wrote (more than three years ago, eek!), Little Miss Cal Poly Student was finishing up her first quarter at college, and I was trying to figure out how to make sure we used up all of her extra meal credits.
Fast-forward 42-something months, and the girl I started writing about when she was in fifth grade is now Little Miss Cal Poly Graduate, a 21-year-old and one of nearly 5,500 students who turned their tassels last weekend.
How did she get here so fast? It seems like she was just 11, then just finished high school, then was halfway through her second year at college when COVID hit.
That was like walking into a wormhole from which we’ve only now just wriggled out. From my vantage point, it seems like she stepped out of one cap and gown right into another.
In between, she got a little more sassy, no less smiley, more secure by the moment, while curiously somehow still straddling kidhood and adultdom at the same time.
When things go awry, she can stomp off with more conviction than she did when she was younger.
But she’s never ended up far away.
At home, her bedroom was only across the hall. After she headed off to college, she was just a 20-minute drive away.
Occasionally, she still needs a shoulder to cry on. But who doesn’t, even if it’s over a Facetime call?
No matter what, she kind of leaves me in awe.
Over her last four years, she kept up with choir, and went from being the newbie in multiple ensembles of singing strangers to a leader who arrives early to put up the decorations for the concert and leaves late to take them down.
She probably would have preferred being an animal science major but dove into the more rigorous biology program to better prepare herself for what comes next.
She started out with college report cards filled with mostly A’s and finished with a full two years of nothing less.
She added a music minor, because she’s always needed harmony in her life, the literal kind helping her achieve the metaphorical type.
She found a community of vibrant young people who embrace their differences and build each other up, establishing friendships that will last a lifetime.
For a couple quarters, she woke up at god-awful hours to help raise a baby horse as part of Cal Poly’s foaling enterprise.
Inevitably, at least once a quarter, she’d send me a class paper to read over. They got more scientific and complex with each passing year.
Whenever she popped in at home, she’d walk through the door and greet that cats and dogs first, calling out to the “floofsters” in a silly voice reserved only for them.
In her final year, we got to experience the greatest of all family confluences, when her brother joined her on campus, Mr. Big Cal Poly Student, who one-upped her by adding a music double major to psychology in his first quarter.
Maybe that will keep him around even more than his four years.
When both chose Cal Poly, some people said they should go away for college, experience something new. But if you can get the best undergraduate education at just the right size school in just the right place for a better price than most anywhere else, why leave?
There will always be time for leaving.
And that’s where we find ourselves now, as Little Miss Cal Poly Grad takes learn by doing to the next level and goes on to Little Miss Vet School Student.
And this time, not at all close by. More like a world away, in fact.
Later this summer, she’ll be off to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and I can only hope the next four years go faster than the last.
On Sunday, after the man with the booming voice read her name over the loudspeakers at Spanos Stadium, she strolled across the field and waved up at us in the stands again and again, pausing only to join her hands in the shape of a heart.
That’s where you’ll always be, wherever you are.
