As announced in the October 23 edition of The Breeze, the Student Government Association at JMU will now be picking a “Student of the Month” from nominations by students, organizations, faculty/staff, administrators, or themselves (the last one which we call “shameless self promotion”).
The requirements to be the Student of the Month are to have at least a 2.0 GPA, be a full-time student, be in good standing, and that only the past 90 days can be considered.
The winner gets a $50 gift certificate to the JMU Bookstore, lunch or dinner with Linwood Rose (JMU President), and a formal resolution of recognition from the SGA Senate.
I am ineligible for the Student of the Month program due to my being somewhat less than full-time this semester (I’m taking six hours, and you need twelve to be considered full-time). Just as well, though. People are always surprised to hear this, but I absolutely HATE public recognition. I despise it. It means very little to me to be recognized publicly in front of a bunch of people. In fact, I can’t stand public recognition and award ceremonies so much that I would deliberately miss recognition functions (and they would have to track me down later to give me the award), and I absolutely refuse to attend my own college graduation at JMU. Seriously. I simply want to receive my degree in the mail and then quietly fade from the JMU scene. Seriously.
Now here’s why people who know me find this to be really weird. I’m always like, “Look at me! Look at what I did!” Let me draw a distinction here. Public recognition from others: BAD. Tooting my own horn: GOOD. I don’t know… if I want to get praise, I’d rather initiate it myself, and “fish for compliments”, so to speak. (Of course, as seen in a recent movie, it doesn’t always work out.)
So it’s really just as well that I’m ineligible for the “Student of the Month” to-do, because if you haven’t gathered it from the above article, first of all, you haven’t been reading carefully enough and need to go back and read it again, and secondly, even if I were nominated or something, I wouldn’t want it anyway.