I went to Professor Delaney’s office hours on a Wednesday morning, which meant taking the early bus and arriving at the building before most people got there. He had a small office with a window that looked at a parking lot. He was, as I said, a small man with direct eye contact, and he looked at me over his reading glasses and said, “What’s going on?”
I said I was behind on the coursework and I didn’t think I could catch up.
He asked if I was working.
I said yes, at the medical billing office, twenty-two to thirty hours a week depending on the week, and that October and November had been higher weeks.
He nodded like this was information he’d heard before, which I imagine he had. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
I said I wanted to catch up.
He said, “Is that realistic right now?”
I thought about it. Really thought about it, which took longer than I wanted it to. “No,” I said.
“Then you have two options,” he said. “You can stay in and likely not pass, or you can withdraw before the fifteenth and take it again when circumstances are different.”
He said it without judgment. This is what I remember most clearly about that conversation: no pity, no lecture about prioritization, no suggestion that I should have managed my time differently. He presented it as a logistics problem with two solutions.
I withdrew on the fourteenth.
That semester I finished Introduction to Research Methods, Health Communication, and Medical Terminology with two As and a B-plus. In the spring I retook Statistics and got a B-plus. The grade point average shows both semesters without explaining why one of them has four courses and one has three.