Bye-bye, Grads

first pho­to: glen with a hand­ful of MS&E grads
sec­ond pho­to: our grads from the grad par­ty we had on Sat­ur­day. We’re miss­ing a few, but you get the idea.

This was a pret­ty hec­tic weekend–it was grad­u­a­tion time for a num­ber of our stu­dents!

This was my first Stan­ford grad­u­a­tion, so I was­n’t sure what to expect…

Here are some obser­va­tions:

1) Stan­ford does­n’t take grad­u­a­tion too seri­ous­ly. Less secure schools make every­body act for­mal and solemn, but Stan­ford lets stu­dents act cel­e­bra­to­ry at their cel­e­bra­tion. You can see a video of the apt­ly-named “Wacky Walk.” I heard there were streak­ers, but I did­n’t see any. It would­n’t sur­prise me if there were–it fits the school cul­ture.

2) The com­mence­ment speak­er was Ale­jan­dro Tole­do, the pres­i­dent of Peru. There’s a video snip­pet from his speech online. He’s got an amaz­ing sto­ry. He was raised in abject pover­ty, and through the inter­ven­tion of the Peace Corps was able to come to Amer­i­ca to get a degree, and ulti­mate­ly to become the first indige­nous pres­i­dent of his coun­try.

3) It was HOT! I’m just glad I did­n’t get worse sun­burn than I did.

4) After the main grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny, there were around 70 small­er grad­u­a­tion cer­e­monies for indi­vid­ual depart­ments. That was the one where they call stu­dents name by name and actu­al­ly hand them a diplo­ma. The one I attend­ed, for the major of Man­age­ment, Sci­ence, and Engi­neer­ing had a rather scrump­tious free buf­fet after­wards.

5) We’re real­ly going to miss our grads. Bye, guys! Don’t for­get to write!