Yesterday was my brother's graduation and I took a day off to celebrate this event with my family. The commencement was held at the Madison Square Garden, which was the same location for my graduation last year but this time a single exercise was held in the main arena instead of two ceremonies in a smaller theater on one day. Anyway, when we arrived, there're lots of people already and we went in after we took a few pictures outside. In last year commencement, the guests didn't have to follow the seat numbers and could sit wherever they wanted. However, the rules were strictly enforced in the arena and this was actually a bad news to us since our seat numbers were at the 300 level and were so far away from the podium. Were the good seats really first come first serve? Later, guests slowly entered the arena and then the students marched in. Since I couldn't see their faces clearly, I really needed to text and call my brother to know where the hell he located and it turned out that he sat nearly in the front row at the right hand side. In order for me to take some pictures, I had to walk all the way from 350 to 120 to have a close enough shot. And I couldn't really stay there for long because one would be forced to leave when the ceremony began. The commencement followed the same procedures and routines for example the national anthem was sung by the same professor and even the principal's speech sounded similar to last year one. Mayor Bloomberg was at the event to leave some remarks but his speech was so uninspiring and boring. Then it's followed by some other speeches, awards, and so on. The only great part of the commencement was always the conferral of the degrees to the graduates. With more than 4,000 students graduating, it wouldn't be possible to let everyone get on the stage and receive his/her degree. So the conferral was done symbolically by a representative, in which I thought it's bad at the time I was graduating. But as an audience this time, as long as I didn't want to leave at 5:30, please make it as short as possible… After the ceremony was concluded, all the graduates and guests were getting out at once and it's extremely hard to find my brother so it took us another 10 minutes to meet up again. Taking pictures was even worse with limited room available. Believe it or not! My parents actually brought my last year cap and grown, which looked exactly the same, with them so I could wear them and posed with my brother. I didn't like this idea at all since I thought it's a one time thing and one shouldn't really reuse them. Did a bride wear her wedding dress again after the wedding's over? In the end, I wore it anyway but refused to wear the cap as the tassel was showing the different year (you know! That's how the manufacturer earned their money… by changing 08 to 09…) All in all, even I didn't really appreciate my fake second graduation, congratulations to my brother!
