Commence and Be Recognized

We had our commencement ceremony down at Home Campus the other night. You should have been there.

One of the things that I like about our campus is that we still have our own ceremony even after we were absorbed into the Mother Ship Campus a few years ago. MSC has their ceremony a few days before ours – they have two, in fact, because they don’t have an indoor space big enough to have it all at once – and then we have ours. They send some of the top administrative people down to our ceremony because they’ve been good about supporting us, but mostly it’s just us in the gym because we can fit more people into the audience than if we hold it in the theater and you want to share this moment with as many people as you can.

It's a fairly compact ceremony for all that. A welcome. A few speeches. The names. One of the things we figured out a while ago is that people want to come and See The People Do The Thing and then leave so we moved most of the awards to a separate ceremony a bit earlier in the month and just focus on the graduates for this one. The whole commencement clocks in at about an hour and a quarter, which is pretty much exactly the right amount of time for it – not so brief as to feel like we’re skimping on the graduates, but not so long as to drag on.

For the second year in a row it’s been my job to read the names of the graduates as they walk across the stage, which is a lovely job to have. They hand me a card with their names, their plans, and any thank-yous they want me to announce as they walk onto the stage, and then they get their moment to shake hands with the bigwigs and be applauded by their family and friends. They’ve worked hard to be standing there. Many of them never thought they would get that far – some never thought they’d go to college at all – and they should be recognized by name for their achievements.

Not all of our students make it to graduation, of course. Some find that college isn’t for them. Some transfer before they earn their degree. Some get the degree but decide that the ceremony just isn’t something they want to do. Some graduated a while ago – everyone from the December grads to the August grads marches in May – and are long gone from the area. Some have families, jobs, and events that have higher priority for their time. But many of them march, because rituals matter and it’s good to stop for a bit and acknowledge the progress you’ve made.

It's a small campus, so we know them. I had 29 advisees eligible to walk across the stage, and good chunk of them decided to come to the ceremony, which means I had a significant percentage of the students there that night. I work in an intensive advising program so I get to know them better than most and it’s always such a lovely thing to see them there. A few former students came back as well – some for their siblings because we’re that kind of place, and others just because. It was good to catch up with them afterward.

This is why we do this.

This is why we have the appointments and remind them of the deadlines and fill out the forms that they need fill out to fix whatever went wrong or grant permission for the things they want to try. This is why we have the staff meetings and the trainings for new systems and old problems and different ways to try things.

All for this night. All to see them rewarded for the work they put in and to send them off to the next thing in their lives.

Congratulations to the graduates!

And don’t be strangers, y’hear?