It's what being an adult is like. You don't study for the fanfare, you study for a goal or for yourself.
That and if you have a significant other, you might also score a celebratory shagging.
Edit: Never mind, just realized this is an anon on 4chan posting about engineering school.
You're still right, but OP's SO is their dominant hand.
I think it's practical. I haven't known many engineer types to make a huge deal of graduation per se. It's just the next step in a bigger procedure.
Talk for yourself. My university friends had a fantastic party.
Yeah, that's totally me. I honestly don't see any value in the certificate, but employers do, so whatever.
I went to school for one reason: to get a job. I enjoyed my field of study, but I hated the college process because it took all the fun out of what I enjoyed about my area of study. In fact, I was better at learning relevant things (i.e. things I actually use now) on my own vs in school. But hey, got the job, so task accomplished.
I was a lot more excited about finishing my first project at work than finishing school. Go figure.
I’m kind of surprised; most colleges and universities I’ve seen still have a ceremony for people graduating at the end of the fall semester. It’s not nearly as elaborate as the one ending the spring semester, but it’s still something.
Still, most of life is going to be like that. Usually no real ceremonies for the last day on the job. Move out of your old house/apartment is a lot of work at the end and then you lock the door for the last time.
Congratulations, you’re an adult now.
Slight difference; being an ex on has the opposite effect on your ability to get a job.
Agreed, Exxon is a horrible company but I hear the pay is good. It would be tough for an ex-con to get a job as well.
Oof, touché.
Leaving it as is.
Validation need not come from anywhere outside yourself. Set your own goals. Do your best. Pat yourself on the back. People who 'recognize' you only do so superficially anyway. No one can truly know what you've done or where you've been.
I mean, sure, but it is still nice to have some external validation now and again you know?
I've never attended a singe scholarly celebration since my middle schools where I went and realized that it was completely pointless
plus the whole preparation and fanfare is draining for me, id like to actually celebrate by relaxing not stressing over an event
I feel that. Too many people, and most are just sitting there, looking at other people and clapping.
Two things. 1. If you hated it maybe it was the wrong choice, 2. You can walk in the spring commencement if you want to, that’s what I did for grad school.
I love engineering, I hated University. The framework of school is not for everyone and reading 300 pages of complex stuff every week for 4 years is boring to death and it isn't for me, and for a lot of people.
School of all levels caters to one type of learning, and not everyone is good with that style.
I experienced a wide array of learning types. Some profs rely on student-led learning from book readings and assignments, some relied on in-person lectures, some worked through examples in class and had similar examples on homework along with challenge problems that extend the examples in new ways, one had us use mathcad to build a model of increasing complexity with each lecture.
Saying university caters to one type is an absurd reduction. Unless that one type is “learning”.
Engineering is a skilled trade with a long list of topics that have to be covered. You don’t have to be an engineer, you could do a two year tech school or just DIY and roll your own, prove yourself through your work to get into engineering-like jobs.
- if you hated engineering in uni, will you love the work afterwards?
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Does it matter if you hate the work if it's the only thing you can find that pays more than subsistence wages?
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Do any of our lives matter in this hell?
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Depends if who you work for. If you work for bad management prepare for some goon to tell you what you should be doing, be wrong about what they tell you, not know what they want, and to demand it sooner than you tell them it will take. They will then change their mind and still expect it to take less time. They will be constantly frustrated with you and you will hate it.
Good management will find work with clear value to customers and you will feel valued and be given *mostly adequate time to do your work. You will put in your hours and be paid. You'll still be jerked around by typical corporate politics, but it's everywhere so buckle up. Better than ditch digging unless that's what you want.
Depends on the person, depends on the University.
From what I've seen (very old anecdote here, take with salt) some engineering colleges will do everything within the ethics/honor code to obstruct your path to 2nd year. Then they do it again for 3rd. The result are brutally hard classes that are designed to weed students out more than teaching the subject at hand. Even on its best day, school doesn't mirror the real world, but neither does semester after semester of arbitrary hurdles for a degree. The workplace simply has entirely different, but far more palatable, bullshit on offer. IMO, it's completely valid to hate school but love your job afterwards.
Getting out of the military is a lot like that as well
... and then i walked out of the Outprocessing building and took off my beret while still in uniform and walked to my car.
I had my CO sign a paper and then I grabbed my two bags and walked off base. Got an uber to the airport and that was that. Most anticipated but anticlimactic day of my life. I did smoke weed for the first time that day though so that was fun
I just didn't go to my graduation ceremony, despite there being free dinner. Was (and had been for ages) struggling with pretty bad depression and didn't feel I deserved any of it.
I've got 3 degrees and have a Gold Duke of Edinburgh award (if you do bronze, silver, and gold, you get to shake hands with a failed king)
- Never went to any graduation ceremony
- Never went to Buckingham Palace to shake hands with Prince Philip.
I am right now, sitting at home in my jammies eating burritos. I regret nothing.
I graduated in the winter in 2023, didn't attend the ceremony or anything. I have really bad social anxiety so the ceremony seemed like more stress than a celebration for me, I just ordered food and relaxed. But I do remember, after walking out of my last final, thinking "damn do that's it huh", I know it's just a bachelors degree but I didn't believe in myself enough to even think I'd ever actually graduate. Things turned out okay though, even had a job lined up before graduation which was lucky given the current job market for software engineering. Believe in yourself, your hard work got you that degree, proud of you man!
Thanks. I've done pretty well for myself, I'd like to say. I landed a nice job around six months later and have been able to show my talent pretty well. Due to fighting with depression I entered the workforce around ten years after most of my peers. As an engineer, I've caught up the median pay for my peers with 15 years more experience. Can't complain.
Didn't go to any of mine outside of high school because I was a kid and my parents could force me on that one. By the time I finished grad school I really felt like I was just another person in an increasingly growing rat race. It's not even that I haven't accomplished anything so much as I haven't accomplished anything particularly unique that sets me apart and grants me intellectual value.
I skipped as much as my parents would let me get away with, because in my mind, walking for graduation is give the graduate's family and friends a chance to formally congratulate them. I hated every minute of it, but I can deal with that for one day.
When I finished school, I was already working full-time in my career (internship turned into a FT opportunity), so walking didn't feel valuable at all.
I finished university at the end of 2019. My graduation ceremony was supposed to have happened in 2020 but uh, other things happened. It took me until the latter half of 2022 to even get my hands on my diploma.
The school to hospice informal incarceration pipeline is omnipresent for the working class, and college/trades level is right there in the middle. Right after kid jail and before wage slavery.
I dunno, I prefer this to having to take care of cows and growing my own crops.
Life and the endless crushing need for resources is the prison.
If one is not inclined to social gatherings but still feel a need for something to signal this passage (or any other), a good option is to perform a personal ritual of choice.
Human brains seem to be inclined to appreciate symbolism.
While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think that the lack of ritual is the underlying problem here.
Yeah I just had em mail me the thing
idk
frfr
Why you do graduation ceremony btw? We don't do that here.
It’s a pretty big accomplishment so the schools like to throw a little party. It also allows students to invite family to see the campus and get an idea of how fast they can chug a beer.
First you listen to a bunch of speeches. Then they call everyone's name individually, and you walk across a stage, shake hands with some people, get handed a degree. Then maybe everyone throws their hat in the air.
The worst part for me was that during my high school graduation, I was expected to shake the governor's hand. I had been quite involved in politics that election, but not old enough to vote, and I really disliked out governor (they were in the majority party and barely won w/ <200 votes after multiple recounts, when most major party governors won by >10%). The governor apparently attended my high school, hence the invitation.
Add to that the complete worthlessness of my high school diploma, because I was able to get a 2-year degree before getting my diploma due to concurrent enrollment at a local community college. So not only was it a worthless degree at a school I barely attended the last two years, I had to shake the hand of a politician I hated.
Screw graduation ceremonies, they're complete wastes of time.
I have an MSc and have spent the day cleaning gutters, I have no idea what to do and am unsure whether I'd be better off dead.
Nah man don't die. You got the freedom to go into a different industry if you want to
I don't really know how to do that, but yes, I definitely should.
We are, we are, we are, we are
We are the engineers!
We can, we can, we can, we can
Demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, drink rum
And come along with us!
'Cos we don't give a fuck about anyone else
Who don't give a fuck about us.
That's what the first engineer I ever met said, but to be fair he was a combat engineer. Those guys are scary. Stick to electronics and bridges...
I wonder why they hated school. Maybe the problem was the school and not the topic? Otherwise I feel sad for them disliking the topic they chose as a career path :(
I feel like there's so much interesting stuff out there, there must be something useful that they find at least interesting.
Engineering school is pretty brutal. I love the career and in many ways I loved the schooling, but it was long nights of hard work on difficult stuff, a lot of which you need to understand for the profession but won’t have to do personally outside school. As a whole engineering school has a reputation because of that disparity as well as because some people go through it because it’s a well paying career and not because it’s where they feel they will be happiest, and engineering isn’t a good choice for folks like that.
Thankfully there is often a pretty big difference between studying and working.
I found there to be a level of stress in my studies that I never had a problem with later. An idea that any moment not spent pouring over books was contributing, at least in my mind, to inevitable failure; doubly so with exams looming ahead.
For me finishing my engineering degree was such a massive relief and work is so much better. I'm in anon's boat.
Life can definitely feel easier after you find a job with a steady workflow. It's the slow creep of responsibilities that will eventually overtake the stress of having been a student.
Oh the people who managed a few critical but rarely used pieces of equipment left? Looks like you'll have to figure out how to run it yourself now with limited notes. Your project is floundering because other departments aren't being upfront about their workload? Now you'll have to babysit their work and send constant emails asking them to do their job so you won't fall behind schedule. Are you a doc approver? Better take your laptop with you during vacation to be available for signing off on it.
Yeah I can understand that sitting on a desk all day, reading and taking exams is a pretty harrowing experience for most.
It looks like it's my personal tastes that allowed me to enjoy school. And I really did enjoy it! Hopefully other people find something to do that they love.
Educational institutions are mostly there either to make money or as a public necessity that the rich underfund to have a malleable electorate. The institutions are therefor often understaffed, incompletely equipped, or spending money on things of no benefit to education. The majority of lecturers are thus often quite underpaid, overworked, and unmotivated, which leads to many students being unimpressed.
There are very few institutions and staff that really can show up to work with a smile and be satisfied with their employment.
It's at times baffling and yet understandable why people do not vote for people or parties that want to treat education as a priority. They are a product of the influence of the rich and powerful on our institutions. That this dude is unsatisfied is no surprise to me.
Dang, I did not have the same experience in education! I'm thankful that the situation seems less dire where I'm from. Professors are quite well paid, definitely upper class; while tuition costs are less than 1k€ per year (with financial help available). As they are public institutions, Universities in Belgium do lack funds and their equipment/infrastructure is sometimes in a worse state than American or UK Unis. But still not too shabby!
Good job anon. Now take a long break and get back to it when you have your long term goals sorted.
Til 22-year-olds have long term goals
That's what the long break is for.
Imagine being privileged enough to take a long break and have long term goals.
Oh yeah, it's an absolute thrill to crash on your friends couches and work menial jobs to buy weed.
Sure he can jump right into the workforce but the guy said he feels like getting released from prison. I'm suggesting he just bum around for a bit.
Yes, schools are prisons. Their purpose is not education at all but rather indoctrination, filtering, privilege, control, etc.
As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.
Are you struggling with your maths homework, sweetpie?
What school end their year in December? Also there is always a ceremony if it was a real school.
If you finish all the credits you need in the Fall semester (which ends in December) then yeah, you graduate in the winter. Many schools don't have a separate winter commencement, so winter grads wait until the end of the following Spring semester to participate in the graduation ceremony.
