Suck it up

I was thinking about this post a long time ago, and had put it out of my mind. Let's see if I can type this up quickly.

I have this phrase, "Suck it up", which I believe a Southern gal in N.C. loves as well. [wink]

Besides being a little on the ornery side, I think my college years helped build this attitude. This has helped professionally as well. There is less time with "boo-hoo-hoo" and more time with "well, let's suck it up and figure out how to get ourselves out of this hole".

When I was a Co-op student and working at the Mega-lo-Defense-Contractor, a manager/programmer in my sister group told me, "You know, I love to hire Electrical Engineers as programmers. You get code out of EE's". And I whole-heartedly agreed (and the manager/programmer had a PhD in psychology).

I think a major point in this philosophy was when I was a sophmore in Electrical Engineering. I didn't know what I was getting into, but I signed myself up for 17 hours of classes. Essentially, I was taking 5 classes at the same time - and one of them was self-paced.

The self-paced class was kicking my rear end. It comprised of 36 chapters. The book was phenomenally well-written. You read one chapter, and then you went to the lab where graduate assistants gave you a timed test. Typically, there were 10 questions related to that chapter and you had to pass 8 out of 10 to go onto the next chapter. In theory, you could study 3 chapters at a time and take one test after the other.....except for the fact that chapter 8 depended on your clear understanding of chapter 7, which depended on your clear understanding of chapter 6.

The grade going into the final was the number of chapters you successfully tested to completion. I think (my memory is a bit fuzzy here) that if you finished 28 chapters, you qualified for a "D". If you finished 30 chapters, you got a "C", and if you finished 33 chapters you got a "B" and then 36 chapters equated to an "A" before you took your finals.

I was really behind about a halfway into the semester. I think I was floundering on chapter 10 or 11. And my engineering school was fairly brutal. You could only drop your class on or before the second meeting of that class. Yes, you heard that right. If new classes started on Monday, you had until end of the day Wednesday to drop the class you signed up for. The reason for this will be explained later.

So, halfway through the semester, I was staring a "F" or a "D" straight in the face. And, my other courses were suffering as well.

The rule was you couldn't drop the course (it still blows my mind when people talk about how they were able to drop a course mid-semester!)

Let's see.....the EE department basically laughed at me when I asked if I could possibly drop the self-paced course. I was really down in the dumps. I decided, "What the hell, let me talk to someone at the top! What are they going to do? Fail me?" So, I looked up someone, anyone in the registry and found an assistant dean of student affairs in the college of engineering. And, surprise, they let me make an appointment with him.

I will be forever grateful to this associate dean. I still remember him (although not his name). Now before I go further, I have to remind folks that my Dad was and still is a college professor. So growing up as the kid of a professor, I've seen the other side of things. I didn't blame professors for creating a self-paced book as their "class". I just wondered why I couldn't freakin' drop a class when other colleges seemed to treat that as a standard proceedure.

I told my story of woe to the assistant dean. He listened and nodded his head. He understood my pain, and then told me (very nicely) the realities of my world:

• We were a state college.
• By law and politically, they had to accept as many students as technically qualified.
• Although politically our state school had to accept qualified students, there was no law that said we had to make it easy for them to stay in school.
• More people qualify than they had seats for classes.
• And in fact, they wanted to discourage people who really shouldn't be at this big school from sticking around.
  
• Yes, I was taking a course (the self-paced) that might be considered the sophmore "flunk-out" course.
• It is meant to be the sophmore "flunk-out" course.
• There are other "flunk-out" courses in the junior-senior year because there aren't enough seats available for those years as well.
• And why couldn't the program be a 5 year program? Because the parents who went to school in the 60's and 70's viewed college and 99% of their programs as 4 year programs. to suddenly announce that the [insert name here] Engineering program was a 5 year program would bring outrage to parents scraping to put their kids through school.
  

That talk really opened my eyes to reality. I realized that, yes, "I'M JUST A NUMBER'. Nothing personal, but I was taking up the seat of another potential student who wasn't going to fail this self-paced course next semester. And the irony is the fact that I do accept that "I'm just a number" helps me get along and be willing to work these 20 years at the Mega-lo-corp (where I'm just a number).

So I had a little heart-to-heart with myself after that meeting. I could either just ignore the course and take an "F" on it. Or.....I could "suck it up" and go "guns blazing" and double my efforts.

And this is where built-in Asian shame comes in handy. Could I ever face my Dad by just wussing out? I couldn't blame "the professor" because it was certainly a well written book that was perfect for the course. Could I go to my professor Dad, in Electrical Engineering, and say this little-ol self-paced course kicked my butt?

Hell no!

I decided to go "guns blazing" and I started studying 3-4 chapters at a time. Eventually, I caught up and I ended up with a "B" in the class.

Sometimes at work or in life, someone will be frustrated and sigh, "That's it. Game over." When I hear that, my "fur" gets ruffled and I sorta glare at them. I usually come back with, "What the hell are you talking about. We're going to suck it up!" Seriously, life has worse things to throw at you. Are you going to just walk away, curl up in a fetal position and........do what?

Ever since college, the concept of rolling over and giving up has become foreign to me. It's helped me while I was pacing the halls of a hospital in Honolulu. It's helped me on a NASTY return adoption flight back from Shanghai to a snowed-out O'Hare. And, it's helped me recently with a dog spewing blood out of his nostrils.

I just tell myself to put my big boy panties on and suck it up and go.

Seriously...."game over"?

Puss.