> We create meaning around the stress and soften transitions with rituals and rites of passage.
I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV.
By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I turned down the offer. I sometimes wonder if I'll regret that choice later on down the line.
The ceremonies at the beginning and the end—not a big deal. The part that matters is what you do there.
I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really. We live our lives in the bulk, the area, the day-to-day. We experience others’ lives at boundary transitions, the perimeter, the ending ceremonies.
> I think the celebrations are more for the parents, really.
This is important, and not to be brushed off.
During my PhD, my program had what’s called a “white coat ceremony”. This is typically a medical school ceremony, but my grad program does it after the second year of study to recognize the transition from being a graduate “student” to a graduate “research assistant”.
I was a very isolated and focused student, spending the majority of my waking time in lab from day one of school. By the end of year two, I already viewed myself as being fully immersed in research. So, the ceremony felt trivial to me, and I didn’t plan to attend.
However, at the last minute, my advisor told me he wanted me to attend despite my protest.
Due to the last minute change, I didn’t invite my parents to the ceremony, as they lived several hours away and I didn’t want them to feel obligated to travel on short notice.
As the ceremony started, I immediately realized that it was just as much for the parents as it was for the students. So many parents were there, with clear pride at their children’s growth and success (even though most had no clue what their kids were even studying).
I immediately and deeply regretted not telling my parents about the ceremony. I realized I had made a unilateral decision for them, and that my behavior was very self-oriented and inconsiderate of their desire to see me succeed.
They were disappointed when I told them about it, and I apologized for not inviting them and acknowledged that it was a selfish thing. They’re chill people and didn’t make a fuss over it, but it was a closed door that could never be reopened.
Two years later when I defended my dissertation, that was the moment I wanted my parents to be present, and of course they were. We had a blast celebrating afterwards, so all’s well that ends well.
I strongly believe “maturation” happens in discrete moments, and the start of that white coat ceremony was one of those moments for me. I grew up a lot that day.
I played college football which for the purposes of this conversation isn't a brag but call it a club. A big club. This was at a D3 non scholarship for the love of the game school.
Two weeks before school started I knew 110 students, 15 adult employees, and about 10 recent alums. It was great. I had easy access to people who could answer all my questions. What classes, what professors, what forms, what majors, what restaurants, how to move exams, parties, of age people, cars, parking, tutors etc. Can't recommend it enough.
My daughter is very indoors and "nerdy" for shorthand (So am I I just also do everything and played football). She loved DND. We lived about 12 miles from campus so as soon as she got in I found that they had DND club. I got her to ask to play in the discord early summer. She had a pack of friends by the time school started. A few freshmen and plenty of older classmates.
Can't recommend it enough. Also it generally accelerated me more than the time it took up
I didn't join many clubs when I was in university (in Germany). But for my first job I lived in Cambridge, and just attended clubs at the local university over there, and they mostly just let me in.
> I do regret that I didn't join any clubs in college until my last semester, and that I didn't make the kind of friendships I wanted
As a parent of teenagers, I struggle with how the hell to convey this to my kids. They are so engrossed in YouTube, stupid memes, and games that they don't join any clubs or sports at school; they don't seek out IRL activities; and my 17 year old has no interest in getting his driver's license. I have tried limiting screen time (and I took a lot of good lessons from Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation[0]). They've both got ample opportunities for therapy (depression runs in the family, the eldest has various diagnoses, etc.) and for engagement with peers.
They simply don't make and develop friendships. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be a huge regret of theirs because they've already said that they wished they had more friends. It's infuriating and deeply saddening to see my kids want to be connected, to have everything they need to be connected, but to still not connect.
Have you modeled to them how to make and develop friendships? Have you tried asking them what they've tried to do to make friends?
Limiting negative stimuli isn't enough for people to automatically replace it with good stimuli. It's the same struggle as leaving an abusive relationship or toxic job. People can know something is bad, but they're much less likely to leave a bad situation if they can't imagine what the better alternative is.
For example, my Dad is terrible at making friends. His co-workers and acquaintances like him, but most of the time his only significant relationship is with his spouse and his kids. My mom was great at making friends and finding community, but her ways of relating to people seemed inaccessible and indecipherable to me as a guy.
I did and do go to clubs of various sorts, but it's a real struggle to figure out how to turn those casual acquaintances into meaningful, reciprocal friendships. As soon as I had my own struggles or wasn't obsessively invested in the club, those friendships vanished overnight. I don't know any good books or resources to learn the skill of making friends. I can definitely see how someone who had more mental health struggles or was less extroverted than I who struggled to make friends in these situations would give up on trying.
These ceremonies are meaningful if you invest meaning into them.
For my college graduation, the dean did something small to make the ceremony more meaningful. He asked us all to stand up, look back to our family, and applaud them for supporting us all these years. For me, looking back at my parents and thanking them for all they've done for me was a beautiful moment. And it was a full-circle moment for our family, the culmination of a long journey of immigrating to the US, moving around in search of stability. We had moved to be able to buy a house and to get us good, affordable educations. Both of those dreams were fulfilled at that time.
I don't recall much else from that ceremony. Not the speakers, but a few of the interactions afterward with my fellow students and their families.
Fair. I hope my kids invest some meaning in it (assuming I have kids someday). Or maybe I don't care if they assign meaning to graduation?
I always cared about school, but I saw it as a means to an end. I knew what I wanted to do from a pretty young age, the path to get there was pretty clear, and I went down that path and now here I am, happy that I made it. So, for me, the ceremony really was just a formality because I knew the real reward would be all the exciting stuff I get to do with my education.
But, now I'm considering having a family in the next few years, and someday I might want to show them photos from my graduation. I can't do that, though.
If it makes you feel better, my college graduation was the only one where my school decided to have an outdoor ceremony...in May in the deep south.
Needless to say, wearing a black gown over dress cloths is not great when its 95F and humid out. For our families of all ages, sitting in the football stadium for hours in the middle of the day was even worse. Multiple people were taken to the hospital for heat stroke.
Graduation was a decent excuse for my uncles and brother to come into town for a visit, but I would have happily celebrated graduation at a Mexican restaurant with air conditioning and a margarita without the big ceremony.
As someone who also graduated during the pandemic an moved across the country.
Maybe man, but honestly it just isn't the same as actually getting to say goodbye to your friends.
Out of all of the things that went poorly that year, ppl missing their graduations is definitely pretty low on that list, but on a personal level it just really sucked having your entire social circle just disappear out of your life basically randomly.
Ironically, several of my friends and I got COVID at our delayed graduation ceremony.
And they did multiple years of graduations at once, which made it exceptionally long. By the midway point even the professors onstage in their regalia were all scrolling on their phones.
I skipped mine. Graduating college was not something that I was necessarily proud of. I wouldn't dare try to take that feeling away from someone else though. For me? College was just an obstacle -- a chore -- that was just a step in a much longer journey.
I graduated into the height of the pandemic, so I never had a graduation ceremony. Instead, they played a shitty video presentation over Zoom and my parents cracked open a beer and watched it on TV.
By the time I got invited back for a ceremony, I had already moved hundreds of miles away from my university. Obviously, I turned down the offer. I sometimes wonder if I'll regret that choice later on down the line.