Graduation

Let me tell you a little about my day today. I woke up at 7am, got dressed did my makeup and all that stuff. 9:26, we get to the CS (Computer Science) honors reception thingy. There’s actually three levels of CS honors, just plain honors, high honors and highest honors. I’m not sure what the cutoff points are, but I got high honors. I knew only about half the people there, but that’s better than the 10% I know of the whole department since there was like 25 people or so there (a few didn’t show up). My least favorite professor was there. He remembered me from class and thought I was a great student and insisted on shaking my hand even though it was covered in chocolate muffin.

Oh the pictures. I have very few because, even though both my dad and I brought our cameras, I forgot my memory card and he forgot to charge his battery. I think Helen and Emily have me covered though.

After that, we had about two hours until we had to be where we needed to be for graduation. So, we went over to College Ave, parked and walked on over. My parents got great seats. See, I had to be there at 12:15, but the graduation didn’t actually start until 1:15, when we start walking in. The actual ceremony started at 2:00. We got there at 11:00.

11:30 I stated walking over to where the graduates needed to be so they could line us all up. No one I knew was there. After about half an hour I see Meredithe (hs friend) and I talk to her for a short while. More waiting. I guess it was around 12:30 when Helen found me. We chatted for a bit, walked around looking for people.

Finally, they started lining us up. They had these posts marked off where each row should be in alphabetical order. Then they gave us cards with numbers on them so we could figure out where in the row we were supposed to be. In alphabetical order, I was number 2097, though not everyone showed up for graduation. My card said “highest honors” :D And to pick up our honors cords as we’re walking out if we hadn’t already, which I hadn’t since I wasn’t around campus the last few days.

1:15 they finally started walking us out there. ‘Course it was 2:00 by the time our row got to move. Now, you may be wondering about the number of students graduating seeing as it took 45 minutes to move us all.

Let me explain how our school works. Rutgers is composed of several different colleges. All together, there’s over 30,000 students. Rutgers College, the college I belong to, has about 10,000 I guess. We’re the biggest one, oh joy. Yeah, there was over 2,000 of us graduation, probably around 1,600 plus or minus 100 of us at graduation. Over 600 of us graduation with honors.

Graduation actually made me feel not so smart. 17 people graduated with 4.0s. The one girl, they had do the speech, she was like a double major: molecular biology and biochemistry. She had a 4.0 and 162 credits X( And she graduated in four years! How????

Anyway, the ceremony was three hours long. It didn’t take as long as I thought though for them to call out everyone’s name. They alternated with the beginning of the alphabet and the middle, but of course, being an end of the alphabet person, I was still way towards the end. A good amount of people had already left by the time they got to us.

I snuck into a picture with Helen, Emily and Janet on the way up to the stage. Took me a minute though. I saw the three of them and I was like oh, isn’t that nice, Helen, Emily and Janet are all taking a picture, all the WCS people… wait, I’m a WCS person too, maybe I should go up there. Yeah, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

So, they called my name, my parents couldn’t hear because everyone was so loud by that point. They gave us this book about the real world. I read that while I waited for the last three rows to go up. That only took about 10 minutes. Would have been nice to have the book during the whole time I was sitting there and they were calling out a thousand+ names of people I didn’t know!

And then it was over, yay! We left right after because it was crazy with all the people, I never would have found my friends anyway. Beth called me a bunch of times, so I called her back. She was upset I was leaving. Sorry! I also had to use the bathroom because at that point I hadn’t gone in over five ours and we still had to pick up Bryan and go to the restaurant. That took about 45 minutes due to all the traffic. Was yummy though. And I got presies and cards from Bryan’s family :D

And now I’m home. It was a very long day. I’ll post pictures as soon as soon as I have some to post.