Being late

Yesterday, I left for school twenty minutes before my class started. My apartment is about a five-minute drive from campus, so this seemed like plenty of time to park and then walk the seven or eight minutes to my classroom. I drove quickly to campus, and then made a hopeless run through the lot by the Tanner building, where there is nearly never a spot open between the hours of 9:00am and 12:00pm. I was right to feel hopeless. There was no spot. It is my habit, however, to go through this hopeless ritual before heading to the law school parking lot where I know I can always find a spot.

Not disgruntled, I headed towards the law school. To my dismay, however, I saw that the parking lot was full to the brim. Other graduate students were circling the lot like vultures. Slight panic set in because I remembered that the last and only time this lot was full, I drove through five student lots south of campus for half an hour, trying to find a place to park, and was a half hour late to class. In an attempt to avoid a repeat of that disaster, I decided to try the student lots north of campus. This meant heading back in the direction of my apartment, which made me realize that I might as well have walked that day, but oh well.

Because of fun construction, I parked rather closer to the Harmon building than the Marriott, and then began the trek (in high heels, by the way), realizing that I would probably be fifteen minutes late to class. Being late to class as a graduate student is about one million times worse than being late to class as an undergrad. Not only are your classes smaller, but the door is typically behind the professor, so you have to walk in while everyone stares at you. Worse than that, however, is the perception of lateness as a graduate student. Walking in late as an undergrad is irresponsible, but semi-understandable--especially if it doesn't happen everyday. Walking in late as a graduate student is beyond "irresponsible," well into the realm of "completely unprofessional," and very nearly approaching "you have no future in this field."

The depressing reality of being completely unprofessional was weighing on me when I reached the Marriott center. At that point, a nice young man driving a golf-cart (the ones they give campus tours on) pulled up beside me and said, "Are you going to campus? Do you need a ride?" It was a godsend. Rather than being fifteen minutes late, I was only five minutes late. In graduate school realm, this is a much more excusable level of lateness. While still bad, the perception might just be that you were caught up in pondering the profundities of Romanticism, and lost track of Reality, until you suddenly realized it was 10:30am, and ran to class in true absent-minded, brilliant scholar fashion.

Thank you, golf-cart driver, for saving my reputation as a graduate student, and my feet from a fifteen minute walk in high-heels. That was my tender mercy of the day.