Graduation

  bw graduates 
  Originally uploaded by gapplewagen.

Another colleges' employee asked me the other day if I was going to graduation. I tried to remain noncommittal, "we'll see," "pretty busy," "I sometimes go." He was impassive enough for me to presume criticism and disappointment, to feel guilty. Then he said that really graduation was more for us than the students, the way that we break with them, close off not just the year but relationships to them as students that have built up over four (or more) years.

I've been caught in my own reveries, likely a turn to melancholy so as to avoid the grading that still isn't done. I've labeled what I feel as 'envy' but I don't think that is quite right. Still, I envy the seniors this time that seems to be completely free, completely pleasurable. Nearly a week of organized festivities and disorganized debauchery--hot air balloon rides, champagne toasts, dinners, barbecues, parties, fireworks, and celebrations. No responsibilities.

This might be just a fantasy. There might be worries about what happens now. But many have jobs, graduate school, and internships lined up. Some are headed directly to vacations. So these days may really be an interlude of freedom from responsibility.

But maybe not. I see the faces of the seniors as they walk the campus with their families. It's as if their families reinscribe them with identities they have tried to shed: the hippy kid accompanied by high strung Wall Street-type parents; the conservative prep trailed by over-dressed, insecure, overweight parents; the feminist with her father, his trophy wife, and their infant twins in a double-wide stroller. For all the celebration in the air, the families are like cracks in the surface, reminders that responsibility starts Monday, responsibility for the past as well as the future.

And I can't decide if I want this interlude really to be a time of freedom or if  I want simply to pretend, to revel in the fantasy of such a time. My graduation didn't feel free at all. I cried most of the week. Although I had been accepted into graduate school, I wasn't excited about going. I wanted to work a year in NYC but didn't have a job. I felt like an idiot who knew nothing, who hadn't read or learned much at all. I knew that my friends and I would grow apart and this made it difficult to focus on the summer of travel I would be beginning in a couple of weeks. So I wonder what function the fantasy plays for me as I drive my kids' from piano recitals to band competitions, squeezing in the laundry, glancing too quickly through the articles I have to summarize in the introduction to another issue of the journal, and seeing in the low exam grades clear indications of my inadequacies as a teacher. What would it be like to have none of this at all?

Comments

[Craig]

I've never gone to a graduation ceremony; my brother, on the other hand, has never missed one. I can't imagine wearing semi-formal clothing under heavy academic dress out in thirty-degree weather with ninety percent humidity listening to windbags tell us that the future is ours - if we are responsible, of course. The "real" graduation - at least for those of us in graduate school - is the thesis/dissertation defense. The pomp of the convocation is ridiculous, but it seems moderately appropriate for a dissertation/thesis defense. I like the rituals of defenses; I can't stand the rituals of convocations.

[Nick Bornak]

"I cried most of the week.... I felt like an idiot who knew nothing, who hadn't read or learned much at all. I knew that my friends and I would grow apart and this made it difficult to focus on the summer of travel I would be beginning in a couple of weeks."

As a graduating senior, I feel this way. After delivering my contemptible senior project I felt so empty knowing that I may never return to academia-style philosophy (which, for all its downsides, is still pretty fun). I was not accepted to graduate school: on the surface because one of my universities didn't send a transcript, but more accurately because I didn't have enough motivation to make sure everything was in its right place.

Maybe I shouldn't go to graduate school. My undergraduate degree hasn't endowed me with any practical skills... after all, there's not much demand for literature regurgitation, is there?

[patrick j. mullins]

This is interesting.

I think I had no choice but to attend my high school graduation, but I would not buy a senior ring nor would I ever buy the high school yearbook. I once was forced to be on a high school homecoming parade float, but joined no clubs like Math Club, etc.

So you are all talking about the undergraduate graduation as being the important one? I had never thought that one's Master's Degree Graduation was not also a graduation, but I can't remember if I graduated with that. I didn't attend my Juilliard graduation ceremony, and gave it no thought whatever; so therefore I don't know if I was supposed to attend anything for the Master's. My Major teacher signed me up for either a doctorate or some sort of 'professional studies' or some other post-master's something or other after I'd told him I'd no intention nor interest in doing this. This caused me to get a B Plus on my performance jury for the first time; I'd always made A Minus at least. So I wrote the dean saying that I was furious to receive a letter saying that I had not been accepted into these 'further studies programs' when I had never been even slightly interested in them; and 'shocked not to receive a superior grade'. The whole thing is especially annoying because I might have been accepted had I wanted to be (but I hadn't) and I would therefore have played with an entirely different dynamic in the performance had I know I was 'going further' (but that was a fugue state too, since I didn't want any more 'further'.)

I haven't ever even thought about my graduations lo those many years ago until this post. So maybe the worst one is not knowing whether I even had a ceremony for the Master's one.

[bob allen]

to paraphrase REM, "The End of the World as We Know It...", I never graduated from anything, and I feel fine...

[Yanina]

Initially I thought the photo was of chocolates in a box.
When I realized that the candy-coated delicacies were actually people, I wondered if this was some deep metaphor.