Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Commencement

This last Friday I finally participated in the commencement ceremonies for the degree I earned a year ago. There was a university wide commencement ceremony which I attended but had to leave early from and a convocation ceremony which I got to sit all the way through. After coming out on the other side of the graduation ceremony I think I would have been better served to simply go to the university wide commencement ceremony and just ignored the existence of the convocation. At the convocation I got to walk across a stage while someone read my name... it wasn't really much to get too excited about. I would rather go to the ceremony where the bulk of the program is made up of speeches instead of disconnected contextless names.

Although it is somewhat nice to have some personal recognition in hindsight it definitely wasn't worth sitting through everyone elses names in order to get my few seconds to cross the stage. Or at least it isn't worth it when I could just as easily get a ceremonial conferral of my degree just by attending the commencement, albeit not a a personal one.