graduation!

So I graduated on Monday!! Well, I walked across the stage at Commencement and received a fake diploma, which is almost the same thing. :) I won't get my real diploma until August, but what made Monday so special (other than the fact that it means I'm almost DONE with college!) is that I wasn't granted permission to walk by the school. Haha...yeah that's right. I was told that I couldn't walk, but I did it anyway. Since when do I care about authority? ;)

I just finished my third year in college. After I take a couple classes over the summer, I'm going to be completely done with my degree requirements, i.e., I'll be done! Students in this situation normally walk in the Commencement ceremonies in the following year, which means that I should have walked in May 2006. There's one little problem--I'm joining the Peace Corps, and I'm scheduled to leave in September. This means that I won't be here next May, and because of PC policy which requires that volunteers stay in their service countries for at least a year before returning home, I couldn't come back to walk even if I wanted to. So what would have been the most logical thing to do to satiate my parents' need to see me walk (because I didn't really care about walking and sitting through a four-hour ceremony)? Walk this year, right? Not according to the dean responsible for such matters at my school. He suggested that I return in THREE YEARS and walk with a class I barely know. Does that make any sense?? After all the money my parents paid, you'd imagine that they wouldn't give me grief about walking. I spoke to the dean twice with no luck, so some people suggested that I walk anyway. So I did. :)

I used my brother's gown from last year and showed up at 7:15 am (yuck) with all the other graduates. Everyone had white index cards with their names (and their pronunciations) on them--I brought my own. ;) We were told to hand the index cards to a person standing by the stage right before we walked across the stage. Easy enough, right? Except when the time came for graduates to walk across the stage, I realized, with horror, that the person calling out names was the aforementioned dean with a stick up his... Yep, just my luck. He knew I wasn't supposed to walk and I knew that I wasn't going to let him stop me. So I just played it cool, crossed out the real spelling of my name on my index card (leaving the pronunciation there), and handed the card to him when the time came. He looked at my card and hesitated. He waited for what seemed like forever, and then HE CALLED OUT MY NAME as I walked across the stage. Knowing that the same dean who denied me my right to walk called out my name and probably felt like an a-hole at that moment was AMAZING. I think it was my biggest accomplishment at EU. HAHA...well...maybe not, but I think I would've made Ferris Bueller proud. ;)