Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!

The line frames life as an education more demanding and consequential than formal schooling. By calling life her “college,” the speaker treats daily experience—work, relationships, hardship, moral choices—as a curriculum meant to shape character. “May I graduate well” suggests an ethical, not merely practical, standard of success: to finish one’s life having learned what matters and having met its trials with integrity. The wish to “earn some honors” is modestly aspirational, implying recognition not as fame but as the inward or outward marks of a life well-lived—virtue, usefulness, and growth. The tone blends humility with resolve, a hallmark of Alcott’s moral earnestness.