Scott A. Roberts

This weekend, my family came up to Minneapolis to help me celebrate my “graduation” from graduate school.  I put this in quotes, because I don’t actually have a Ph.D. now.  Actually, I haven’t even scheduled my thesis defense.  I’m still planning on graduating sometime in the early fall of this year (September or October).  However, this is the closest graduation ceremony to then, so I was allowed to walk, even though I’m not done yet.

Regardless, I’ve had a really great weekend with the family.  I’ve been trying to get my aunt and uncles up here to visit for quite a while, and now they’ve finally made it.  We gave them the whirlwind tour of the twin cities, and I think everybody had enough fun.

Today was the actual ceremony, and it was relatively nice.  For some reason, the graduates were required to line up at 11:30 for a 1:00 ceremony.  I assumed they would spend that time lining us up and giving us directions.  Nope.  Nothing organized happened then.  We just stood in line for 1.5 hours.  Awesome.

The ceremony itself was extremely long, but not much you can do about that when you graduate 700 advanced degree students.  I’m just sorry that my family had to sit through 2 hours of people’s names being called.  Things went rather quickly until we got to the PhDs.  Each PhD graduate got their name, major, and advisor called, then got their hood placed around their necks.  This took about 3x as long as master students. 

Regardless, we finally made it through the entire thing, and now I have a cool hood that I can wear around to make myself feel special. 

After graduation and some touring of Minneapolis, we headed to dinner at It’s Greek to Me.  Chongai, Masano, and Janice joined Christine, the family, and I, and I think we all had a great time.  Then back to my place for some cake.  And now I’m still awake, for some reason.

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