Graduation Day

Today was graduation day for Northwestern University, in which my sister Emily would be graduating from the School of Communication. L and I flew out early in the morning to be able to make it in time, and for once there were no travel issues.

The graduation was held in Northwestern's football stadium, which was pretty impressive. I want to compare it to the one at Gainesville, but we only saw the outside of that one so it's hard to guess the size differential. In any case, we walked in through the gates and presented our tickets, which got barely a glance, received a program, and the first thing that greeted us was a concessions stand, with popcorn, hot dogs, pretzels, and drinks (sodas). Wow. I was pretty tempted, just to say I had a pretzel at Em's graduation, but we'd just eaten lunch beforehand so I wasn't that hungry. We found pretty good seats - the ceremony was held at 6pm, which meant that the sun wasn't at the peak, and the seating was set up such that the ceremony (held in the center of the field) was facing the west set of seats which were nicely in the shade. At first it looked like some of the graduating class were going to have to sit in the sun, but by the time everyone arrived it was all in the shade.

So, people arriving... first, let me mention those present in the stands: Jonathan, Frances, Mom, Dad, Lorian and myself. Frances had her nice camera with and was taking pictures for a lot of this, I will try and get some of those to post here. The processional march into the stadium was a really impressive display of coordination. The graduates came in from both the north and south sides, in three different streams from each side, ending up (somehow) in the correct section of seats for each school. I later figured out the trick, there were colored strips marked on the ground for the path of each stream of students, which they mostly stuck with. The actual processional took nearly thirty-five minutes for everyone to arrive. The slowest group was the faculty, followed closely by the fifty-year anniversary alumni, but it was only a little while in before it stopped being boring, as that's when we saw Emily arrive. We'd been clued in to where she'd be sitting, so it was easy to tell which stream of people she'd have to be in, and once spotted we got to do the whole "pointing her out to the people that hadn't seen her" yet routine. This was compounded by Emily trying to point us out to her friends who were walking next to her - Zev and Margaret (I think, I'm not very good with names). Zev apparently couldn't spot us at all, which was funny to both sides based on the facial expressions and the relative ease at which the rest had spotted each other. I should mention that mom at this point was extremely happy and kept waving to Emily happily during the entire rest of the processional. Eventually several of us got tired and sat down. The ceremony was interesting, it started with a prayer. However, it wasn't a particular religion's prayer, but rather a very odd attempt at being acceptable to everyone regardless of religion. Except in the sense that it completely left out any polytheistic religions, and atheists, etc, etc. It was also a case of speaking a whole lot, but not actually saying much, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate prayers for their meaning and intent, even though I'm not particularly religious, the emotion and meaning behind a lot of prayers I really like/agree with. In any case, this one sorta fell flat for me. There was another at the end which I actually liked a lot - the benediction was given by a Jewish rabbi and was good to hear, didn't make any apology for what religion it came from and still had a good message and presentation.

Anyways, now we get to the commencement speaker, skipping over the honorary degrees section. The commencement speaker was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, an actress whom I wasn't familiar with, but apparently played a character on "Seinfeld" as well as many other things. She was also an undergraduate at Northwestern, who did not graduate! This was an excellent combination for a commencement speaker: she not only knew the undergraduate population, she knew all sorts of great in-jokes for that crowd and made it accessible to everyone in the audience. She was witty, funny and serious at all the right points, and it was an excellent commencement speech. The interesting thing is if I compare it to Caltech's, the main points had a lot of similarity: they were really concerned about the environment and where we will be in the future, but her presentation was upbeat and encouraging, pointing out the little things one can do to try and make a dent, and the patterns and behaviors that can change to make progress. In summary, the speech was excellent and kept attention very well, and who can dislike a speech where one of the big pieces of advice given to the students was "Don't be an ass!"

After that it was pretty much time for degrees and walking out and stuff, they don't call all the names for the graduation, which is probably a good thing considering how many people there were and that it took two hours even without that. I did notice that there weren't really any of the annoying air-horns that invaded Caltech's ceremony, which was nice. Also, as a random footnote, Jonathan did get a hot dog in the middle of the ceremony and it looked excellent. I think graduation ceremonies with concessions stands are an excellent idea, I'm sad now that I didn't get a pretzel.