Commencement aka convocation was overrated. Five minutes into the keynote speaker’s speech, I gave up and stuffed my ears with Arielle Dombasle off my phone. How can you write for a newspaper for ten years and turn up with a B-grade General Paper essay of a speech? And our valedictorian! My goodness. I’m sorry, I know you’re from a Chinese-speaking family, probably a Malaysian, and that you’ve made great strides in your English, but what possessed the Faculty of Law to give you First Class Honors in Law when you pronounce “remember” as “ramble” and swallow every other word? Save me, Mademoiselle Dombasle.
I guess I expected more from Commencement. This was four years of my life after all. The official end to my education and the start of employment. And yet I really can’t say I felt anything coming out of the hall. Maybe I’ve been spoiled. I’ve come out to the University Cultural Center foyer so many times with emotion too much, too many that this time, even coming out where for the first time my parents awaited in the crowd… It was just flat. Four Dance Uncensoreds, two Hall Productions — I am spoiled. But Commencement just can’t compare.
Maybe my entire university life was for this one day called Commencement. Maybe the degree and the transcripts are the only things that really matter in life after university. But every day until the day I die, it won’t be Commencement I think of but that walk from backstage, in make-up and costume and a glow you just can’t beat, through the courtyard and out into the foyer where our audience awaits, and know that, yeah, I spent my four years exactly the way I should have spent them.
