I've scored my last final exam . . .

. . . posted the grades, written the feedback forms, and driven half-way across the country. Our family mission for the next week is to buy or rent a house near the university where, starting this autumn, I will work on a PhD in engineering.

So, having spent the last three years as, contextually*, the uber alpha, I will spend the next three as just another shit-eating grad student, and at the bottom of that totem pole as well, considering that I barely got in.

*The context being the classes I teach, of course. Back in the dorms, no doubt I am "Professor so-and-so: what a dweeb. I bet his daughters are adopted . . ."