College Flashback

no not that kind. sorry.

Last week, I took my first step to get letters after my name. One of the designations you can get in the insurance industry is that of a C.I.C. Quite frankly, I am not sure what C.I.C. stands for - Certified Insurance C...something, I think. But to get it, you must take five - three day courses and pass a 20 question essay test. It is miserable. I mean it is terrible. Someone described it to me as "torture" and that was pretty much what it was. And really, the worst part was not the fact that I had to sit through 20 hours of lecture on commercial property coverage and what endorsement to a policy will provide additional coverage if you must build to meet updated building codes - Ordinance and Law. It wasn't the 100 or so notecards I had stacked up to help me review the mountain of information. It wasn't even the two hour essay exam. The worst part of the whole time I was gone actually surprised me.

I was lonely. Obviously, I missed my family. I broke the land speed record coming home on Saturday. However, it wasn't JUST that I missed my family. I missed social interaction. That may sound weird from someone who spent 20+ hours in a room with 100 other people. But the thing was no one talked to anyone else. Many of the people there were taking the exam and so whenever they weren't in class, they were in their hotel room studying. During breaks, everyone would go out and call people on their cell phones. People didn't really talk to each other. I sat in class, then had lunch by myself, then went back to class, then had dinner by myself, then studied.....by myself.

I was very surprised by how much I longed for social interaction. I found myself chatting up the waitresses at the restaurants and front desk people at the hotel and the cashier at Starbucks just to have SOMEONE to talk to. It was very odd. I have always considered myself an introvert (my Meyers Briggs test confirms that). However, as I get older, maybe I am getting a little more extraverted. I must be because this conference was a wall flower's dream and I was bouncing off the walls.

So while this weekend brought back memories of finals week except in this case, the class started AND ended in the course of less than a week (and there were no runs to late night showings of Braveheart or The Matrix), the one major thing that was different was the time in between class. Where I used to spend it with friends, here I spent it alone.

I hope and pray that I passed that test and will only have to endure four more of those things. Not because I would hate studying and taking the test again (which I would) but I don't want to spend three more days feeling like I am on a desert island. I need to have some human interaction.

Well, I have to go. I'm going to go see what Missy is doing.......