Graduation: Wednesday, Commencement

Tuesday was a day of lull time, there wasn’t anything happening on that day related to graduation, but that worked out fine since my mom and my girlfriend were flying into town that day; it made for a nice break. But Wednesday was the big show, Commencement of the 253rd Graduating Class of Columbia University in the City of New York. We’d been told ahead of time that the ceremony would draw 40,000 people onto the main Morningside Heights campus, so it came as no surprise that the scene down on the street that morning was crazy. It looked like a Saturday market in some foreign country. I met up with my parents, my brother, and my girlfriend to take them down to the main entrance, and then I had to go to a separate entrance for the graduates, which was temporarily being blocked off by the Barnard girls filing in from the campus across the street. 3,000+ graduates, and they only have a single entrance onto the campus for the grads? Not good planning in my mind. But we finally got in.Once we were on the lawn, we had awhile to wait (we being the GS graduates in my class) and I realized that my classmates had been smarter about it than I had. They’d worn shorts and T-shirts under their graduation robes, where I’d worn slacks & a tie. But in due course of time after much fooling around, we got out onto the main seating area.It was quite a sight. The GS class was seated on bleachers to the left hand side of the center plaza. I was glad that we were seated on bleachers as it gave us a much better view of the proceedings, even though they had screens for the guests. All the graduates from all of the different Columbia programs were there: all four of the undergraduate schools, the business school people, the doctors, all the masters and PhD candidates, everyone. The ceremony progressed by having several people come up and speak, then the President of the University (Lee Bollinger, a great guy) gave out the honorary degrees to a bunch of folks mostly nobody knew. After this was finished, the tradition is that the Dean of each of the different schools comes up, gives a speech for why their program’s graduates are so fantastic, and ‘asks’ the President to confer upon them the degrees they have earned. The speech given by the outgoing Dean of the School of Engineering was hilarious, he called his students “solar powered, alloy outfitted, optimally engineered” and other things like this. His students all had noisemakers with them, so they were the loudest bunch and everyone was laughing with them, particularly at the end when the dean rushed back up to the podium and said, “I love you guys!!”Finally the President gets up and agrees to confer the degrees. There is a mace that is carried out of the library as part of the ceremony that represents the President’s power to confer the degrees; apparently it originally came over from England (since Columbia was originally King’s College and was re-established as Columbia after the Revolutionary War). He didn’t ‘wield’ the mace itself, which I thought was a shame, but everyone gets their degrees, and so it was all good in the end. As the ceremony was dispersing, U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ was playing over the sound system; I paused and just let it all soak in that I was actually finished. My girlfriend told me later that she could tell I was definitely ‘in the moment’ just then, which was true. There was too much emotion and too many different feelings standing there in the sun with my classmates at the end of this amazing journey to totally sum it all up. But that song, which is one of my favorite, hit it pretty close.It wasn’t until I picked up my actual degree right after the ceremony that it truly sunk in that I was finished. Holding it in my hands, something about having a tangible acknowledgement of all that hard work, almost brought me to tears. “My heart is aglow …”