Bragging - we all have to do it once in a while!

My youngest son has a rocky school history.  His road to college has been circuitous, and continues to be fraught with difficulties.  He currently attends an art school in NY, and is in the second half of his junior year on his way to a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in fashion design.  His ideal career would be as a menswear fashion designer.  Does anyone have a job for him?  A summer internship?

But that isn't the purpose of my post, nor are previous academic successes, including several semesters on the Dean's list and President's list.  This semester has been particularly rocky, for reasons unassociated with schooling, and he has been struggling to keep up in classes and stay focused.  One participatory factor in his struggles was that the school required all members of the junior class to submit a portfolio for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) scholarship competition (http://www.cfda.com/scholarship-program/).  The scholarship program offers financial awards to top students from art schools across the country in several categories and through several competitive programs, the junior class scholarship program being the primary method. 

At my son's school, the work for CFDA started early in the semester, and forced him into many late nights and all-nighters as he worked through his themes, his designs, and technical details.  My son is a perfectionist, having great difficulty in letting go of the smallest detail, and worrying over minutiae others might miss.  His submission went down to the last minute, including major technical difficulties (at one point earlier in the process he lost 4 hours worth of design work when his computer crashed) and files too larger for the printer's computer.  However, he was notified yesterday that the school has selected him as one of five entrants from the school to move forward to the main competition.

This has been a major boost to his mood, since he considers being selected as an honor.  I am glad he sees it that way, since the odds of winning are still only 1 in 10; better than they were before, but definitely not a shoe-in.  So that is my brag!  I hope that in May I will have the opportunity to brag about winning, but in case I don't, I wanted to have this opportunity to publicly state how proud I am of him and his achievements.  He has come a long way from struggling through high school.