I've graduated! (kind of)

Yesterday was the commencement ceremony for CSU Sacramento, and I got to walk! The whole experience was amazing and overwhelming, all at once. I participated in commencement with my friends, Michael, Lisa, and Nicole. Out of the four of us, only one was really done...Nicole. The rest of us have finished our coursework but will be working on our theses over the summer.
That means that although I've "graduated" and gotten some job offers, I still have a summer full of work ahead.

Commencement was at Arco Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings. My dad and sister came, and being that they are hard-core Laker fans, I think their skin was crawling a little. However, there were some serious perks to having graduation at the arena, the biggest being that we were inside an air-conditioned building (score!). There was also plenty of seating, and they had cameras all over the place, putting people on the "jumbo-tron" screens hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the arena.

All of the master's students got to go first, and since Communication Studies is alphabetically the second major at Sac State, we were among the very first people to walk. I think I was the fifth person to go overall. I definitely sat in the front row :) The procession went like this:
1. Walk up to a professor and take a picture being "hooded"
2. Take a picture in front of the CA & US flags
3. Take a picture in front of the Sac State Seal
4. Take a picture getting your "diploma" and shaking the hand of some Sac State bigwig
5. Go sit down

Funny thing: in the past, the Master's students have hooded each other, rather than being hooded by an actual faculty member. So my advisor and I came up with a plan that if the students were hooding each other again, we would simply walk out to the front corner and he would hood me himself. Luckily, that didn't have to happen. I get really nervous about breaking rules.

Since we went first, my friends and I had the pleasure of zoning out for the rest of the commencement, which lasted about two hours total. Afterward, we went outside and took pictures with each other, family, and faculty members. It was an amazingly fun experience. So fun, in fact, that I'm going to do it all over again in the fall. Also because, for some reason, the commencement program didn't have my name in it. I really need a program that lists me as getting a Master's degree!!!!


Me and Michele, one of my committee members. She is going to be awesome enough to read through the drafts of my thesis this summer so that I can finish up and keep my jobs :)