Truly experience the California heat
Nobody told us that even after we’ve passed all our exams, we would still have to survive one more thing: the scorching 2.5 hours of the commencement ceremony. This year’s graduation events look like this:
After sending us off with a sweet Caltech chocolate crunch cake at the Athenaeum, graduates had to wake up and get dressed by the (relatively) early hours of 8:45 am for a class photo.
After the class photo, graduates were promptly gathered up and signed in. Nobody really knew what to expect. We were whisked off to areas marked for each row of seats.
We were standing there around 9 am, and had to wait till 10 am for commencement to begin and to file to our seats. We took this time to take photos. We were also recommended to drop off belongings at a coat check area.
We finally got lined up alphabetically and sent towards the lawn outside the “Wedding Cake”, or Beckman Auditorium and got sat down in the searing sun. My black diploma folder was getting hot, so I kept everything covered under the white program booklet. At one point, I saw a fellow graduate had taken off her mortarboard and placed the booklet on her head instead.
