Don’t go to convocation

Nicholas Maronese
Editor-in-Chief

It’s easy to romanticize your convocation.
The big white tent, freshly pressed gowns, friends, family and summer sunshine. This is it! You’ve made it! You’ve earned your post-secondary degree and now it’s time to celebrate!
It’s not so rosy when you look at it realistically.
What is convocation really? I’ve never been to a university convocation ceremony myself, but from what I hear, it’s basically three incredibly boring hours of you sitting there, waiting, biding your time texting friends until the MC mispronounces your name and calls you to shake hands with someone you’ve never met and don’t really care about. He hands you a slip of paper meant to represent your degree: your proof-of-purchase from York University.

It’s all about packaging and presentation, really. It’s the institution’s way of saying, “We now present our new 2011 product line!” Of course, they say it in Latin, just so you don’t catch on.
If you really wanted to celebrate with friends and family, you can do it someplace else, away from the eyes of hundreds of strangers. If you really wanted to enjoy the summer sun, you’d go for a bike ride instead of sitting in a chair. And your real degree? You can’t pick it up until the month after the ceremony.
But the university is a business, as well as a place of learning, and the best way to stay in business is to make a real show every time you come out with a new model.
“But I’m on the honour roll!” you protest. “I have to go! I’m on the dean’s list!” Oh, yes. You’re one of those premium special editions, are you? You’re part of the Golden Key top 15 percent? That makes me, you and a few thousand other people.
What do those accolades really mean in the end? Are they going to make you happier, or more successful? Unless you’re trying to get into a graduate program, your grades don’t mean anything now that your four years are up.
But convocation is more than empty and unfulfilling; it’s degrading. Your uniqueness is stripped away from you (the gowns are all the same, stupid), you’re held up by the institution like a shiny object and four full, rich years of your life, learning and youthful liberty are somehow summed up in a few words, a handshake and a degree – a little bit of paper and ink.
Do these foreign, arbitrary tokens really adequately represent your experience at York University? If you’re anything like me, they can’t.
For me, going to York University has been an absolutely incredible learning experience; a brilliantly enjoyable social adventure; and, without a doubt, the best four years of my life. And for the most part, all I had to do was let it happen; the university, student government and Excalibur newspaper (insert your own favourite student club here) put in a lot of the effort.
It feels cruel to cram all of that into some bizarre three-hour ceremony, to simply blend my experience into some academic tradition, to exchange it for that silly proof-of-purchase slip.
If I’d known the price was going to be so high, I never would have bought it in the first place.