it is finished

I walked the line last night. After four-and-a-half years, eight or nine semesters (depending on if you count the semester I skipped), and what I calculated to be just short of two hundred classes, I am done with my degree. I thought I would be graduating with honors since my GPA is 3.97 (this is me bragging), but this program apparently does not have a cum laude system. As I like to do, I would like to post some observations about the graduation process.

The speakers for the night kind of phoned it in. Three people spoke, and only one appeared to have put much thought into it. The theme of the one decent speech was that having an MBA is great because you aren't tied to one industry. It was a good point considering the venue, but there was not a lot of meat even in that speech.

Someone mentioned that MBAs are not held in as high regard right now because they, specifically those that have gone into finance, are believed to be the cause of the current economic mess. Why isn't anyone pointing the fingers at the economists and actuaries whose models suggested there was no housing bubble? I'm just saying...

All of the graduations I have witnessed have involved the graduate handing a card to a person who reads his or her name as the graduate walks across stage to be recognized. While I was watching this it occurred to me that someone could crash a graduation rather easily if he or she knew ahead of time what the name cards were going to look like. I would not be surprised if some enterprising reality show tried a stunt like that in the near future.

I have not researched the traditions surrounding mortarboards, tassels, hoods, etc. Part of me wants to believe that some of this was a practical joke that got out of hand. I heard another graduate observing that the whole regalia is about as impractical as it could reasonably be.

I always planned on taking as long as I did for both family and economic reasons. Unfortunately, this meant that most of the people I new well in the program graduated in 2008 or 2009. I knew a handful of people in the ceremony, but not a ton of them. That is kind of a shame because I think the main appeal to me of a graduation is that there is supposed to be a shared camaraderie of what we have survived.

We brought both kids to the ceremony. They were apparently a handful. Golden and my mom dealt with them well, though. I was told that there were a lot of toddlers who had to be taken to the lobby because they weren't doing well in the ceremony. I'll leave it at that.

The main thing on my mind at this point is that I am just happy to have the whole process behind me. In the year or two before I started pursuing the degree I decided that I was going to get a masters degree sooner or later, so I am happy to not have that still hanging over me. If I take academic (rather than corporate) classes in the future, it will almost certainly be simply for my personal benefit and growth, though.