I graduated!

On a Saturday morning (May 6), we went through a couple-hour ceremony to get "hooded" and to hear about the responsibility in having a master's degree. The next afternoon, we waited through several hours to get our diploma covers and to hear our names read out loud in the stadium. There were thousands of people, lots of excitement and pictures, and it was a fun time. My mom got to see it all, too, and I was very proud to have her there. The happiest thing for me (and probably for a lot of the other folks who were at the ceremonies as well) was that it was all finished, for good. What a great feeling.

There was some bittersweetness, though, as we all stood out in the rain after the ceremony was over, waiting for our family members to find us in the crowds. Most of us would never see each other again, and never again in the same circumstances that we had known one another for the past two years. The 10 or so people who had spent 16 hours a week in the classroom together would never meet in a classroom again, would never complain about assignments or the impossibility of juggling work, internship, classes and a personal life. We had been through a lot, had grown to know one another well in this very specific place. And now, suddenly, right there in the rainy parking lot, we were off to different things. It was wierd and happy and sad all at the same time.