I hope that you had the time of your life

I imagine the title is enough to let you know what this post will be about. Graduation of course. The Greenday song is pretty much only appropriate for school bus sing-a-longs, proms, and graduations. Well, appropriate may be a bit much - tolerated may be more accurate.

Graduation was everything that you hope it to be - a bunch of people, some you know, watching you cross a stage in a gown with an odd hood and getting your degree. I know it sounds lame, and it was extremely long, but it was the best moment of my life I think. Perhaps because education has always been so important to my family, I completely internalized how big this moment was since I understood what university was.

Oddly enough, and I think Dal is the only school to do this, you get "capped" before you get your degree. This caused quite a rukus with the graduands (fun fact: once you complete your course work, you are a graduand until you get your degree). We didn't have a rehearsal for graduation and we heard that you need to kneel to get capped. Where do we kneel? How low? How long? One knee or two? Luckily a professor came by to answer our multitude of questions. We could decide how to kneel, it didn't matter if it was one knee or two, or whatever. This prompted me to say, "So we just need to get low?", which then prompted about 10 of my peers to start chanting Low low low low low low low with the appropriate dance moves to go with. A highlight of graduation, for sure.

So we filled into the Rebecca Cohm auditorium and basically started getting degrees immediately. I like Dal's efficiency. Hearing "Lauren Marie Edwards, Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology with Distinction" was surreal. I walked over, knelt and was capped, then got my degree. I didn't fall, I didn't trip - it was a success! The only embarassing thing that anyone did, actually, was drop their blackberry on stage. I'd say taking your cell phone on stage is a bit of a faux-pas, for future reference.

After graduation it was an absolute frenzy. We were hungry, tired, over-heated, looking for our parents. My dad and I went on a wild goose chase around campus, getting a photo at all of the landmarks we could think of - Killam library (my home away from home away from home), Henry Hicks building, the Wickwire field, the big Dalhousie sign.