What is a Graduation?
What is a Graduation?
There are certain events in your life—graduations, your wedding, first day on the job—that are real milestones in a person’s life. A graduation party celebrates both a job well done and a very bright future. This year, millions of families will get together to celebrate the graduate’s accomplishment and toast his or her future. It’s a special day,
The days of pep rallies, class trips, team practices, and school shows are coming to an end for your child. It’s time for graduation – an exciting time, but also one filled with a little sadness about saying goodbye to the past, and anxiety while looking ahead to the future.
Keep all of these feelings in mind, as you plan to celebrate your child’s graduation with a special party befitting such a momentous occasion. Involve your graduate in all of the decisions, and be sure to make it a party where she has a great time making new memories to take with her into the next stage of her life.
Graduation is the action of receiving or conferring an academic degree or the associated ceremony. The date of event is often called degree day. The event itself is also called commencement, convocation or invocation. In the United States and Canada, it is also used to refer to the advancement from a primary or secondary school level. Beginning at the secondary school level in the United States, such ceremonies usually include a procession of the faculty and candidates. The candidates will almost always wear academic dress, and increasingly faculty will do the same. At the college and university level the opposite is true, and the faculty will usually wear academic dress at the formal ceremonies, as will the trustees and degree candidates. Many colleges have traditions associated with the graduation ceremony, the most common likely the throwing of mortarboards in the air.
At many large U. S. institutions, where many hundreds of degrees are being granted at once, the main ceremony (commencement) in the sports stadium or other large venue is followed by smaller ceremonies (diploma ceremony) at sites around campus where deans and faculty of each academic organization (college, department, program, etc.) distribute diplomas to their graduates. Another means of handling very large numbers of graduates is to have several ceremonies, divided by field of study, at a central site over the course of a weekend instead of one single ceremony.
The final problem that arises is the large number of family members / guests that each graduating student wants to attend. Universities try to circumvent this by allocating a specified number of graduation tickets to each student that will be graduating. Students can then buy/sell/trade these tickets amongst each other or through their school’s online forums, message boards, etc. Due to their nature, these tickets are often departed with at a premium depending on the level of competition.
In any case, typically each candidate is given a diploma by an academic administrator or official such as the dean or department head. It is also common for graduates not to receive their actual diploma at the ceremony but instead a certificate indicating that they participated in the ceremony or a booklet to hold the diploma in. At the high school level, this allows teachers to withhold diplomas from students who are unruly during the ceremony; at the college level, this allows students who need an extra quarter or semester to participate in the official ceremony with their classmates.
At most colleges and universities in the U. S., the faculty technically will recommend that each candidate be given a degree, which is then formally conferred by the president or other institutional official. Typically, this is accomplished by a pair of short set speeches by a senior academic official and a senior institutional official: “Mr. President, on behalf of the faculty of Letters and Science, I hereby declare that these candidates have met all the requirements for the degree of … and request that such degree be conferred upon them.” “Under the authority vested in me by the State of Iowa and the Trustees of Podunk College, I hereby confer upon these candidates the degree of …”
A graduation or commencement speech, in the U.S., is a public speech given by a student or by alumnus of a university to a graduating class and their guests. Common themes of the graduation speech include wishing the graduates well in the “real world”, cautioning that the world of academe is a special place where they were taught to think (a common variation contradicts this view).
Most recently, especially in prestigious institutions, the trend has been to find a celebrity (often one with no apparent connection to the specific institution or education in general) or a politician to deliver the speech. A notable exception is the annual Columbia University Commencement, at which the tradition has been that only the current university president shall give the commencement address. Individual colleges and schools of Columbia often invite a speaker at their individual graduation ceremonies, however.
At the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario a historical drill team performs at the “Sunset Ceremony” (a military tattoo the night before the graduation parade. Eighteen officer cadets, dressed in formal scarlet uniforms and wielding late 19th-century Enfield rifles fend off an attack by cadets dressed as rebels using similar rifles of smaller caliber.
