End of days

A glorious day out here in Stanford. Unfortunately I spent most of it indoors, tinkering away on job applications, but I managed to get out for a stroll round the Dish with a coursemate, so not a complete washout. 

It's now got to the point that pretty much everything I do here will be the last time I do it, so I feel I should try to fit in plenty of outdoors time, getting the most of Stanford's greenery and the California sun. But I've got a world of crap to get sorted before being booted out, so it's more likely that I'll getting the applications in or shoveling stuff into boxes before turning in my keys. Not ideal, but there you go.

There is some good stuff happening though: a friend of mine's mum treated us to a rather spiffy Greek meal at Evvia, so I'm getting to drink from the graduation cup, even though my folks are back in the UK. And I think there'll be a few more parties over the next couple of days to celebrate getting through the year.

All in all, though, it's been a bit of an anticlimax. Unlike finals in the UK, where you work up to a crescendo and then flee the university with streamers hanging from your hair, the last year has been a sustained and intense block of graft. And now we emerge into an unsure market, with unemployment on the rise, and a selection of debts hanging round our necks. Plus we're being booted out of our flats basically the moment graduation is over, so there's not even time to enjoy campus. It just seems to have come and gone.

So tomorrow I'll don the gown I found outside the campus bookstore and head over to the ceremonies for the final push. There's the main effort in the stadium, which sounds like it'll last forever (it's the one where they read out thousands of names), and then the Comm department graduation later on. I might not go to the first one, if it really is as interminable as feared. But the second one should be interesting, and I'll actually get to pick up my diploma. So this time tomorrow I'll be Dan Walker Smith, MA (Stanford).

(The place to get the gowns was shut, by the way, but someone had balled up a faculty gown and left it in a magazine rack, so I left my contact details and nabbed it - I now think I'll be graduating in a faculty gown from the business department, which is a bit random, but might be better for getting a job).