Graduation

Ay congratulations, it’s a celebration! Party all day, I knew you’ve been waiting!

I have attended multiple graduation ceremonies throughout the years and I will say that the fall off past high school years exists. I believe this might just be my growing distance from connecting with the school itself as high school was the last point in which I felt I grew up with a specific class. Granted, my class of 2017 had some truly wild things happen throughout the final year that made it truly memorable. Some examples include, the executive director of the school getting fired due to embezzling funds as well as people from my year breaking into the school to hang a funny flag from the top of the school’s radio tower.

While I don’t remember the exact details, what I can remember were all of the experiences in high school that lead up to the moment of graduation. All culminating in a pretty fun (and chaotic) graduation ceremony that arguably broke the school. Let’s just say that my class year got so wild that the next graduating year was docile by comparison.

Now contrast my highschool experiences with university where, yes, I am interacting with people coming from all walks of life. There are occasional moments of relation that allow me to meet different types of people, but most of them were mostly short lived and fade into obscurity within my mind. Maybe it was due to my choices ending up as a somewhat social hermit that caused me to have less overall connections from university… but I believe it was my perception that university was mostly a place for me to focus on my studies.

It felt as if the closer I was to getting my degree, the further I was from everyone around me.

Fun fact: I did not attend my school’s graduation ceremony for my year. This was due to my graduation ceremony being moved to a year later by a certain global pandemic. Correction: I did attend it for my friend’s graduation but I didn’t participate in the ceremony itself.

After having attended a total of 5 university graduations, I can give my general feelings on graduations themselves.

1. Self glazing is the meta. Perhaps it’s the graduations I attended, but the each university skips no time for any opportunity to say what they are the best in. We are #1, we have the first college of Ethnic Studies in the world, we will change the world. While it’s okay to remind everyone why they chose the university in the first place, the self congratulations often becomes the focus while the graduates themselves are sidelined in their own ceremony.
2. Most speeches have way too much yapping. I’m a yapper myself, but even I become aware when my own talk is getting off topic and turns into rambling. I guess they likely have a time slot to fill; however, they should be filling it with more focused talk on the message of their speech. Either the speech devolves into a whole essay thesis with too much info or they talk about something not directly related to the graduation at hand. The best speeches I found were ones that focused on resonating with the current year’s graduations and assuring them with observations from their personal experience.
3. Chaos prevention turns into corporate money making. I get that these universities need to ensure the graduation ceremony is safe and (relatively) clean, but I really get annoyed by all the ways they decide to tackle the issue. They need to reduce the risk of having unidentified bags? Charge people an absurd price to store their bags outside of the venue. What’s that? You want to not starve and thirst during the ceremony? You aren’t allowed to bring your own snacks and instead enjoy our selection of overpriced slop.