Graduation

"The only thing more annoying than hearing pomp and circumstance for 45 minutes is playing pomp and circumstance for 45 minutes," Sandra stated, as we were making our way to the campus center lawn for graduation. In classic Teach Next Year fashion, we managed to be the absolute last graduates to walk into the ceremony.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Surely there must have been some rehearsal or line-up so that we, the anxious and proud graduates, would know what to do and where to go on the big day. Nope. There was no semblance of the graduates lining up in alphabetical order and parading from the chapel, past Miller and down to the academic quad where Dean Kassman meticulously practiced murdering our names, while we waited to receive our final grades (some of us with more apprehension than others....Saunders....you passed English, hooray!) Ok, so what did happen behind the scenes? All the graduates met in the gym and were handed a card to fill out and carry with them. The card asked you to fill in, among other things the “Phonetic Pronunciation of your name” (doesn't matter I was still called Ivanah, despite writing E-Lana) and to check off if you were male or female as well as whether or not you had a beard, glasses, mustache etc. So really, I didn’t feel like I was graduating, I felt like I was playing the classic board game, “Guess Who?” Why am I doing all this? Oh, to “ensure that I receive the correct graduation photo.” Just as I am thinking, “is that really a problem?” Sandra quipped, “Yeah, when I graduated from Syracuse they sent me the wrong graduation pictures, apparently I am a black guy with a beard.” Lovely. Ok, so we made our way down to commencement with our complimentary UMASS Boston rain ponchos and were pleasantly surprised to find water bottles on our chairs. Nice touch, so this is what the $150 graduation fee goes to…. All this aside, the ceremony was lovely and Barack Obama was an amazing graduation speaker. After the main ceremony, we broke off into our individual colleges where we unceremoniously received our diplomas. This past year I not only received my Masters in Education, I received a Masters in Bureaucracy.