The Grand Finale

My teammates are gone.

After a week of presentations, reports, meetings, an awards banquet, a talent show, and a graduation ceremony, each corps member from the North Central NCCC region's Class 17 has packed up his or her bags and left Vinton, Iowa. It is beyond weird. It definitely feels like it has been a very long year, but I remember all the fear I initially had about being a team leader and going out on projects, and now it's all over. I got a lot of nice feedback from my teammates before they left in our last one-on-one meetings, and I feel like each one of my Maple 4 peeps left feeling satisfied with their experience. There are things I could have done differently, but I'm going to leave here on November 23rd feeling like I really made the most out of this experience.


My favorite part of this week was the evening after graduation. To put this into context, there are only a couple of bars in town. One bar is known as the TL bar, and that's where we go to chill, drink, complain, or whatever without having to see our teammates. The corps members go to a bar called Golf Right. But on graduation evening, we all went to Golf Right, and it was one of the best nights I've had in this program. Everybody was dancing, drinking, eating pizza, and just reminiscing about the year. I danced like I haven't danced in a loooong time. I got up on a chair and made a toast to the corps members, then I went around and shook all their hands. I was just so happy that we made it to this point, as there were about 50 people, CM's and TL's alike who were either fired or quit over the course of the year. We're the survivors! I will miss everybody in this program so much as I head back home. Despite the frustrations of the year, it was one of the best life experiences I have had, and probably will ever have. Maybe I'll even do it again. But not for a while, because I'm pooped out. As we finish up here on campus, cleaning and helping staff prepare for the next NCCC class, the team leaders are just enjoying out last week together. Last night the other Maple Unit TL's and I went out to a nice restaurant called Granite City for dinner. And here we are with our supervisor Jimmy at graduation.

Tonight all of the TL's from the different units are heading to Iowa City together for a night on the town, and then tomorrow Jimmy is having Maple over for lunch at his house. In the meantime, I'm just trying to figure out how to get a job. And transferring all of my work contacts to my real phone and email account. It's surreal to say the least.