Graduation

Who needs adult life?

Well, second post and second attempt at being vaguely interesting. As I seem to be basing my blog on the implication that I will be detailing the bone-achingly banality of a recent university graduate, I should probably begin with my recent graduation.

Beneath the heat of the midday sun and the pompously expensive rental robes and ceremonial head-ware stood a clammy, nervous and admittedly quite damp 22 year old male accompanied by his immediate family, waiting for the time to come when he would enter the characteristically concrete 1970s building of the union. The building transformed with the supposedly elegant velure carpet, ceremonial drapes and endless chairs; surrounded by the wallpaper of chuffingly proud parents of the graduands.

Parents or children?

But who is all this ceremony and pomposity for?

• The Student? Well all I was thinking whilst I was in my heat emitting robes and suit, waiting for my piece of paper and 10 seconds on the plinth, was that I have now done what today's society needs. I am now a university graduate. A man of education. 3 years of work to finally be shot of educational facilities. I was just happy to have a certificate which could in prospect enable to have any job I desired.
• The University? These people are happy. They have my £9,000 plus maintenance grants and loans, and all they give me in exchange is a plethora of comments and constructive criticism and a piece of A4 paper with a computerised name typed on. 
• The Parents? This is the demographic for whom the graduation ceremony was designed. The people who weren't there for the highs and the lows, and there were plenty of lows. This is their day. All the pomposity, the ceremony are there for the sake of the people who weren't there in the first place. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but if the culmination of the 3 or more years that a student spends at university, is just a grandiose 80 minutes for the sake of the parents. It just seems starkly anti-climactic.

So graduation ceremonies are only for the parents., Underneath the sweltering warmth of the solar orb and the expectation of ready-to-be-proud onlookers, the culmination of 3 sweltering years had passed and my time as a student was eclipsed by the ever depressing loom of financially independent adult life.

The dusk had come for the protective bubble of student life and the dawn was approaching for independent adult life. How daunting and shockingly realistic.

photo credit: www.lumaxart.com/