Graduation

Last night I had my first graduation ceremony since high school. I was talking to another graduand who mentioned that at her high school graduation all the teachers wore academic robes. I told her that at the school I went to in Wodonga we were lucky if the teachers wore shoes. We were classy like that.

My first mistake of the evening was to take the instructions on the letter they sent us at face value: women were told to wear semi-formal attire, while men were told to wear business clothing. Turns out they wanted us all to wear clothes that would be suitable for a job interview - so why the hell didn't they say so on the letter? I followed their instructions and ended up wearing a very, very nice - albeit very, very low cut - semi-formal dress. On its own it's quite presentable, but whack an academic gown on top and suddenly it looked like my breasts were trying to escape through any available gap in the material. I tried to pin the hood over the offending area, but all I could think of when walking up to receive my certificate was the jiggling spectacle that would be appearing on the big screen above the stage, thanks to the presence of a videographer to capture all the highlights of the evening. One good thing about my outfit was that I wasn't in danger of heat stroke like all the other students, though. Those damn gowns are like a sauna. Another thing to note is if you get enough people together wearing them it's a fine line between sombre, dignified ceremony and Polyphonic Spree.

One of the fun parts of the evening was standing right in front of classmates who I had studied with for four years and count the minutes before they recognised me. I stood right in front of poor Oz and waved madly at her, but it wasn't until she was a metre away that she realised who I was. Who knew blonde hair and a robe could change someone so much?

Of course the best thing about the graduation ceremony was that, in essence, it was just a run-through. Can't be bothered waiting in line for professional photos? Bugger it, I'll do it next time. Not sure if I want to buy the academic robes as a souvenir? Well, the PhD ones are far fancier so I'll just do it in three years time. Plus I'll get a puffy hat then. Who wants a dumb, stiff trencher (mortar-board to my friends across the pond) when you can have something so utterly puffy?

And speaking of robes, photos and souvenirs - at $AUS170 for the basic photo package I figured out it would be more affordable to buy the damn gown and organise a photo shoot at my leisure. Less queuing involved too. So this time my parents and boyfriend just took happy snaps. Unfortunately we forgot to tell Dad how to focus our camera, so all the ones he took of Donald and I are blurry as crap. The one Donald took of my parents and I is quite nice, though.

Graduation photo

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Mum and dad enjoyed themselves, which is the main thing since I was doing the graduation ceremony more for their benefit than mine. Dad shouted us out to dinner afterwards and bought a couple of bottles of wine, which I drank plenty of in celebration. And to further my celebration today I got to go to uni with a severe hangover and sit through a two hour session on project management. Then I wrote a critical synopsis, found out the microwave wasn't working so had to eat my lunch cold, realised I forgot my articles at home so had to go home for them, had to organise a morning tea for the research students tomorrow, wrote 2,000 words of my thesis and then discovered EndNote wasn't working so I had to do all my footnotes manually. Apparently the joys of academia don't relax just because you've graduated.