Graduation ceremony

It makes perfect sense. I admit it, I could never quite understand why the rest of the world does it any other way. Take, for example. The graduation ceremony in America is right after the last exams of the last year. That’s not fun, is it? People are still excited about their graduation, people still know each other, people care about getting the certificate so they could hang it in their office when they start working, people feel proud about their achievement. All students come with their families from all over the country, wearing fancy traditional clothing and there’s an aroma of something important happening in the air.

We Israelis have a different way of doing it. Over a year and a half after I’ve graduated my MBA, and half a year after most people’s graduation, we were invited to receive our graduation certificates. After seeing my sister’s graduation ceremony (link) I had second thoughts about attending. Honestly, I never went to my BA’s graduation ceremony but that was more because of the fact that by the time they handed out the certificates for those, I was already deep within officers course in the army. But I figured, heck, why not, I’ll go have a look, maybe I’ll see some friends from my studies, not that it was likely, because most students managed to finish their degree a lot fast than I did, probably since they didn’t face a full-time (squared plus plus) IT job while doing it.

The ceremony was a lot nicer than my sister’s, if only for the fact that it was held indoors and not outdoors. Surprisingly, I recognized a lot more faces than I thought I would, but recalling their names was a bit harder. Right after the ceremony, everybody from the MBA took off instantly and there was very little chance to talk to people. Of the few people I talked to, some came up to me to comment me on the unimpressive site I setup to help my friends (link) with statements like “you know, I remember I was looking for exercises in this-and-that but you didn’t have any”. Bahh! Yet, I did meet two people that I was happy to see, but will probably never meet again.

The CFO of Teva, an Israeli company leading the world’s generic pharmaceutical companies, gave a somewhat amusing speech on what a finance officer is really all about, focusing on human interaction rather than on working with low-details numbers, and even the students’ keynote didn’t sound as awful as other graduation ceremonies I’ve heard, but still had the ironic students’ dilemma “we’re not really sure why we did this degree, but maybe someone somewhere might think it’s important for our resumes”.

All in all – it was an awkward ending to 3 years invested in pursuing an academic degree. I was, and maybe still am, mainly preoccupied with the small detail of how few of my study friends I’m still in touch with.