The Diploma in the Drawer
Micah Boswell · Hardin-Simmons University · hours complete 1992 · degree conferred December 2025
In the early nineties I tried to Photoshop my own diploma. Good paper. Correct fonts. My name set in a typeface that suggested tradition. I put it in a drawer, and it stayed there, and that is where it belongs in this story. In the drawer, mostly closed. I never used it. That wasn't the point. That would be wrong. Additionally, background checks were and are real.
But why am I telling you this?
By 1990 I had finished all but three hours of a degree in political science at Hardin-Simmons. After a brief stint in Wichita Falls, I came back in the summer of 1992 and took the last class. I was twenty-three and burnt out in a way I assumed was permanent. The academic hours were done.
The chapel credits were not.
Hardin-Simmons asked its students to show up to chapel, and I hadn't finished mine. By then, I had shed the faith I arrived with and couldn't imagine sitting through one more service to earn a piece of paper. I'd been to church two times on Sunday and once on a weekday evening for most of my life.
There was a simpler road available. I could have walked into the chaplain's office and had one honest conversation.
I never asked.
I want to be clear about what that was. It was pride, not principle. Principle writes a letter, or stops by to have the difficult conversation. Pride photoshops its own diploma.
For thirty years I told the story to every employer who wanted to know. Completed the hours, no degree, happy to explain. Some hiring managers respected it. Some quietly moved my resume to the other pile. LinkedIn asked me for a graduation year at least once a year for two decades, patient as a toll booth. I typed my attendance dates and left the completion field blank. Honesty turned out to be a discipline, not an event.
I had earned an education and I owned every hour of it, but I couldn't point to the certification, so I built a career that had to speak for itself. It was the harder path, but it was my path. As the years passed, explaining it was less difficult. Equivalent experience, and working twice as hard to prove my worth in every chair I sat in.
The school had taken me on a full scholarship in the first place. Not because I was exceptional. Because I was a missionary's son, which in certain circles is its own kind of currency. And when the holidays came and the dorms emptied, somebody always knocked. A student who had heard there was a kid with no place to go. Families who fed a nineteen-year-old reading Chomsky at their breakfast table. They disagreed with me about nearly everything. They fed me anyway. That's when I fell in love with Texas. At Hardin-Simmons. With people who accepted me for who I was, not what I put on to be.
Dr. Weir's philosophy classroom had fluorescent lights, stale coffee, and a stack of newspaper clippings we brought in like offerings. He made us take arguments apart. Name the fallacy. Find the gap between what was said and what was meant. He thought he was teaching critical thinking. He was teaching me to consider, and I have made a living considering things ever since. For banks. For hospitals. For a phone company you have heard of. Every product I have shipped in thirty years of design started with a question Dr. Weir would have recognized.
The faith I refused to sit in chapel for came back for me over time. It took thirty years and a much longer road than the one through the chaplain's office. The questions I learned in that philosophy classroom never dissolved belief. They cleared away the clutter until I could see what I was actually looking at. I did not expect a Baptist university to be the reason I could return to Christianity as a thinking adult.
Gratitude rarely arrives where you ordered it.
In May of 2025 I finally called. Thirty-three years after that summer class, I told the story out loud to the admissions office, the way I had told it to employers for decades. I was braced for an awkward conversation. For the shame I felt I deserved.
What I got was patience. They were welcoming. They were understanding. And then they checked the records.
Every academic hour was accounted for. All of them, sitting in the ledger since 1992.
They put me in the December ceremony.
I drove the four hours to Abilene alone, first time back in thirty years, and walked the stage with students a third my age. One person clapped. A former student, now faculty administrator, remembered me.
Thirty-three years between the last class and the walk. The walk took no time at all.
The Dean whispered, "I'm proud of you."
I held back tears of relief.