I’ve started to have the utmost sympathy for the Wicked Witch of the West. I spent the last three weeks of my undergraduate career holed up at home enslaving flying monkeys and little girls from Kansas. In those last weeks I wrote essay after essay. If not to hand in then to be memorized for exams. So here I am, on the other side of the undergrad bandwagon, ready to graduate (but oh so unprepared for the convocation) and what am I feeling? Nothing.
If it were up to me, I would put the last *cough* *shuffle* five years of my life behind me, roll up the diploma I’m going to get in the mail and call it a day. But I’m told that there are people in my life who want to hear my name recited (alongside a thousand others) by a total stranger. Personally, I think they just want to see me look naked wearing a gown over a dress…or maybe they want to see me master the shake with the right, diploma in the left trick. I’ve done it three times already, (grade 6, 9 and 12) so I think I’ve mastered it. Le sigh, what is the North American fascination with graduations?
Anyway, I would feel like I accomplished something if 85% of my high school class didn’t go to university, or if U of T didn’t accept 65% of its first year applicants. But here I am, alongside another 5000 undergrads that have completed their degrees just as I have. So do I feel special? No. I’m no more qualified at doing anything than I was when I first applied to university.
This is not to say that I haven’t grown. I’m clearly less of a complete nincompoop now than I was then (I don’t know how much that actually says about me). In fact, I’m twenty-five thousand dollars less of a nincompoop and apparently I need to be called on a stage to affirm this.
