Graduation!

I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.

Graduation itself was a fun little ceremony. I will probably upload some pictures when I get internet set up on my main computer. For now it’s a little too much of a hassle to transfer it to my laptop to then upload it to the server. Cornell had all of us line up in the Arts Quad by school. Then we went in a counter-clockwise circle around the quad towards the clocktower. There we kept walking towards Day Hall and then behind the Statler, to the stadium. Impossible as it may seem, I saw my parents as I walked past them, despite the thousands of family members there. They actually got about 3 pictures of me as I passed by.

We waited for the rest of the schools to come in and then President Lehman gave his speech. The speech made heavy use of Star Wars metaphors. He warned us not to go to the “dark side” - narrow vision and quick judgement. It was good and I thought he did a thourough job of making the analogy. Something still sounded wrong with it and a lot of people didn’t like it. I think the biggest reason is that it sounded too much like he was trying to be cool. After everyone and their mom who gave a speech that weekend referenced Snoop Dogg (or Snoopy Dogg), it seemed like everyone was trying a little too hard to be cool. Still, he was able to keep the speech from being boring and overall I’d probably give it an 80/100. It was nowhere near as boring as I thought it would be. I may write more about this event if I feel moved to do so, but I feel that a lot of the feeling has passed, so this is all I felt like writing.

• Graduation