Weblog
I graduated from college this past Sunday. I am now the (proud) owner of an Artium Baccalaureus in Computer Science, compliments of Cornell University.
Half a year ago, I knew I’d be back for another year as a graduate student and was therefore convinced that the affair this year would be pretty insignificant. I thought maybe that I should suspend my excitement until May of 2008, when I’ll actually be leaving for good and starting my career once and for all. Graduating three days ago was just supposed to be a mere, penultimate formality.
Thus, it is such a great thing when the least of our expectations turn out to be completely wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for that moment when my whole class and I stood up as one to receive our parents’ and the university’s final round of applause. You stand there in this huge expanse of all the people who, like you, were kind of naive and awkward upon arriving four years ago, and there are caps and gowns in motion as far as the eye can see. You stand first with your own school, sharing the limelight with other like-minds, and then you stand with the whole university.
The sight of it all motivated a culminating sense of unity and fellowship divested of academic pride and pretense. For the moment, it didn’t matter to me that we emerged from any Ivy League university with this or that honor. All that mattered was that we were all there together, celebrating the end of this whole, grand, crazy thing. They always say that Commencement is about the beginning of something to come, which is a fine bit of rhetoric for the speech that desires to be motivational and progressive, but what’s to say of the future when all around me are the people who, for better or for worse, gave a little something to my past?
Anyway, it’s not for me to say what this “grand, crazy thing” was for everyone, but four years of anything that end with that many smiles, photos, and happy people in one concentrated area have got to amount to more than just an education.