Dressed up in silly clothes today. Kind of like Aston Villa except without the sponsorship or the mildly annoying accent.
Yes, that's right, time to graduate. Headed up to pick up the bizarrely-coloured gown nice and early to get the official (=expensive) photos done before the rush. Back home briefly to take a few more pics, brighten up the neighbourhood for a few minutes (I got some strange looks from the neighbours) and back up to the university for the ceremony.
The ceremony itself lasted a little less than an hour, which was pretty good considering it was all Bachelors, Masters and Doctors degrees in Computer Science. Interestingly the number of PhDs was larger than the number of MScs, but I suspect that's just down to the highly fashionable clothing you get to wear as a PhD. Eventually my turn came around: hand the hood to Eric Cooke, wait for Wendy to read out the name and off I go (to the loud 'whoop' cheers of a number of ITO students who'd already been presented with their BSc degrees by this point), kneel before the Chancellor (apparently because he's not quite tall enough to perform the ritual if we're standing), Eric hands him the hood, Chancellor loops it neatly over my head, says a few non-threatening words and off I go.
Quick champagne reception (featuring food, I am happy to report) where my "two guests" (wife and mother) were introduced to various friends and acquaintances, including the President of the British Computer Society (pictured above, mainly because he supervised my PhD and headed up AKT), and, best of all, my above-mentioned friends who are now ITO graduates. They're all off to highly-paid London jobs (or, in one case, the Royal Air Force) while I continue to mooch around the Comp Sci department as a Research Fellow. Still, it was good to see them one last time.
The rain continued all day - and indeed returns as I write this - but it didn't dampen the day at all. Thoroughly enjoyable and fun, despite the hopelessly useless clothing I was forced to wear.
If you're interested, there are some photos online from graduation day and from the party we had the day before, and Gloria even made a 40-second video (high bandwidth and lower bandwidth) of the Chancellor getting to meet me. Lucky fellow.
9 comments:
Hmm, why can't I ever see your pics? Rolling over them does not show me comments and they do not enlarge when I click on them.
That is the second time I've seen those robes this week. Friend of mine from school / church graduated on Friday - biochemistry rather than monkeying about with computers and such though.
In other news, it's been raining in Gloucestershire ...
Congrats, literally all done and dusted now.
I look back on my time as a postgrad and it really was a great laugh (I'm glossing over all the quarterly reports, trips to Daresbury and RAL etc).
It all gets a bit dull now, you go from only doing things that are new to only doing things that have been done before (otherwise its a business risk apparently?)
as you can tell, it's one of those days!
Becky - Hm.. what can I say on the pic front? I've tested the page on Windows and Linux with IE, Firefox and Safari (Windows version), also checked it out on a page that shows you how it looks on Safari on a Mac. The rollover-for-comments thing is dependent on how the browser deals with the 'alt' tag for images (typically it pops them up as a tool tag, although Safari seems not to) but click on pic to make it the main pic is pretty normal HTML/javascript and does work fine on the Safari and Firefox versions I've tested...
so.. apologies! I have no idea why it doesn't work! BTW - how is it in your neck of the woods? Any electricity or water issues?
McDoug - one of those days? Tell you what.. come back to the uni as a researcher and you can have one of those YEARS...
Well I am running Safari (v.1.3.2) on Mac OS X (v.10.3.9) and it don't work for me :-P
Actually, we are remarkably dry ... never been so glad to live in a first-floor flat though! The basement flats along here copped it, and there was some really bad flooding a few minutes from us. If you check out my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/p/Becky_Swanwick/708005449) I have posted a couple of short videos of what it was like outside my office, which is less than 10 minutes' walk from where we live.
The main problem is lack of running water: ours went off early yesterday evening, and we are not likely to get it back for seven days minimum, and they are talking about two weeks! Still, at least we had forewarning, so we filled every available vessel including the bath! We are keeping fingers crossed about the electricity, as it has been touch and go whether the local substation would go down but, fingers crossed, everything ok so far.
hmmm beginning to wonder if the weekend trip to the UK is a good idea?!?!
McDoug
Photos didn't work for me in Safari 2.0.4 on OS X 10.4.10 either. OnClick events in Safari are legendarily temperamental. Works just fine in Firefox, there's nothing proprietary in there it's just a Safari oddity.
Well done DM, the little I understood of the thesis was ace. Is there life after Uni?!
Mr Duncan! Well done.. You even managed to smile while wearing West Ham / Villa colours!
Thanks, Struan, Firefox worked for me too.
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