Commencement

Well, that day is now over.

In true Jeff style, it began with me getting up early to work on something I had months to prepare.  Of course, I was exhausted, since I went to bed at 2 a.m. working on it as much as possible.  Around 9:30, I had finally finished something I felt was fluid and coherent enough to be read in front of thousands of people, so I then went on to print it out.

Except my printer is out of ink.  This hasn’t really been a problem for me, since I’m always on campus and there’s free wireless printing there.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t on campus.  I asked my roommate if I could print something on his computer, but, of course, his printer was out of ink as well.  No problem, I’ll just make an extra trip to campus.  Luckily, I checked the hours, and due to the commencement ceremonies and the fact that there is no class in session, all of the computer labs were closed.  Well, there’s always Kinko’s.

After a perusal of the Farmer’s Market, per my father’s insistence, we stopped by Kinko’s to print out three pages of commencement speech.  Little did I know, but in order to do so, it meant two minutes of using a computer at $0.20/min and three sheets printed at $0.49/sheet.  Avoid Kinko’s for your printing needs.

With my speech in hand, it was just a matter of waiting to go.  At 12:30, my parents picked up David, Caitlin, and me in order to head to the university.  Looking snazzy, we wandered over to the Pavilion, where I promptly gained entrance and the family was forced to enter with the rest of the plebs.

I found the stage party room, where I promptly ate food and relaxed.  I kept on checking for the family in the reserved seating area, but they didn’t appear until 40 minutes later.  So I wandered around, finding friends, eating more food, etc.  When they finally got inside, I went and visited them, getting loaded with leis and stealing chilled water for them.

Then it was time for the pictures.  The stage party had several pictures as a group, then all the students got pictures with the chancellor and the dean of his or her college.  I found it amusing that when these pictures were being taken, the chancellor turned to me and introduced himself saying, “I’m Larry Vanderhoef.”  I introduced myself, but I couldn’t help wondering what kind of student it would take to make it to commencement and not know who the chancellor is.  Not to mention, I was a panelist at his retreat in the fall, but to his credit, we never officially met there.

After a little bit of waiting, we were finally informed that the graduates were filing in, meaning we got to slip backstage and were the last to walk to our seats.  It was a time for standing around and talking to the chancellor, which I did with a moderate awkwardness.

Once seated, the ceremony began.  It was the usual college commencement, this ceremony having around 900 graduates. The entire ceremony can be viewed here, if you have the time and patience.  The speech I gave can be read here.

Once that was all done, we filed off the stage, went back to the stage party room, then proceeded to take more pictures, this time with family.  Click, click, click, then we were out in the hot Davis summer weather.

In all, it was an exhausting day, probably the main reason for this post being several days after the day of these events.  Actually, I still need some recovery.