Graduation 2017

Well, it's finally over. Mostly. I still have to do an internship before it's official, but I am finished with my classes. Last Friday and Saturday were the graduation ceremonies. I didn't get many pictures myself, I was a but busy, but I gave my dad my camera, and my friend Rachel was there and took quite a few great pictures as well.

Friday night was the convocation ceremony for the graduates in the schools of LAS, Liberal Arts & Sciences.

We all got a medal from the school to wear during the ceremony.

Advertising was the first school into Hilton Coliseum, so I was one of the first ones in.

And since we were first onto the floor, we were also the first up.

The woman on the end in black, one of the people reading our names, was actually one of my favorite teachers from 4 years ago when I first started at Iowa State! Her name is Jane Cox, and she taught my History of Theater class, before I switched majors, when I was still going for the design degree. I actually even wrote a whole blog post about her, which you can find HERE. I'm sure she didn't recognize me, I was in a class of probably hundreds, but I recognized her immediately, and it was nice to see her again.

Afterwards we tried to get some pictures.

But the lighting was not very good, so this is the best we have. :)

That was convocation. The big one was the next day. To begin, every school went to a different location to line up. We were supposed to be there by 12, and the ceremony didn't start until 1:30, so there was a lot of sitting around.

My location was the Cyclone training arena.

I rarely take selfies but I did that day.

I took a picture as we walked out on the field of Jack Trice stadium. You can see just a fraction of the people graduating here. The ceremony was huge. I think there was almost 5000 people graduating here. Little did I know, I got my cousins Shaina and Sasha in this picture, as well as Rachel.

She texted me until I saw them. :p

She also got a picture of my family all the way on the other side of the stadium.

And Dad got a picture of them. :p

He also took a picture of Jackson. :)

Here's a game for you.

It's similar to Where's Waldo, but you're trying to find me. :p

Does this help?

I am there, but good luck finding me.

This was the picture published on the school newspaper's website the next day.

That's a lot of people.

Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, and Iowa State Alumni, gave the commencement speech.

LAS was the second school to go, so I was up rather quickly, in comparison to the whole ceremony.

We all went through a photo tent to get our picture taken by a professional photographer before we went across the stage, but they didn't tell us what the tent was beforehand. My dark sense of humor imagined something nefarious going on in there. In particular I was thinking of a scene from an episode of Doctor Who were people were lined up to enter a building in order to be "upgraded" into a Cyberman. Yes, it would not have been very funny if it had been true, but I have a weird sense of humor. :p

No one got a very good picture of me actually getting the diploma (cover) but Rachel did get a great picture of me on the giant screen over the field.

The rest of the ceremony lasted until after 5, and by the end pretty much everyone had left. I didn't want to be one of THOSE people, I didn't want to seem rude and leave just because it was more convenient, so I stayed.

I suppose I should have just left; in the end, staying got me nothing but a sunburn. :p

But a girl gave me a streamer wand to shoot confetti, so I guess that was one good thing. :p

Afterwards I took another selfie while I waited for my family.

And then we went back to grandma's for a reception.

And Rachel insisted I pose for pictures with people. :)

Shaina

Rachel

 Sasha

Alex

Shaina and Alex

 Joel

Joel and Jared

Mom and Dad

That night, after everyone had left, I found this attached to my car.

Not sure who left it there, or why I didn't notice it earlier.

Mom thought it was Joel, but I never heard for sure. :p

And that was the day! I am glad that Rachel and Dad (and Sasha with my phone) were there to get pictures, because only like 5 of these were mine. There were of course official photographers there, and I should be getting a copy of those pictures, but I don't know when those will be coming. I'll probably do another post whenever I get those pictures.

As I said before, I won't have OFFICIALLY graduated until I've done an internship, and I am currently working toward that. I'm spending my first few weeks of summer building a portfolio/website. I'm making mostly a lot of new art and taking a lot of new photos for the site. I'll probably share some of the new stuff as I create it, and I'll of course share the website when it's finished. Stay tuned!

My Favorite Teacher

I had some good teachers this semester, but my theater teacher in particular I liked the most. She was always cheerful, always in a good mood, and she always had something funny to tell us, whether about the lesson or something she had come across while grading.

She also had a special way of dealing with problem students. One incident in particular really made me love her. The Friday before our first exam, someone in the class before us had had a medical emergency, leading to paramedics being called, and the room being off limits for almost the whole class period. Due to that delay, she told us that she would move the exam from Monday to the following Wednesday.

Monday morning the room was PACKED. The syllabus had stated that that was the date of the exam, so all the students who were in theater, but never came to class, were there to take the test. As I waited for class to start I could hear whispers around me.

"Is it true there's no class?"

"I don't know. I think there is. She's got a pile of papers up there."

The teacher then began to call out names from the stack as they were all papers written by the students that she had graded. She then reminded people of the incident on Friday, and that there was no test that day. Immediately there was a mass exodus, and everyone who was able, (That had only come for the exam) left the room. She didn't let this bother her and went right on with the lesson.

After talking awhile, she started up a movie clip to illustrate the point she was making. Not long after she had turned out the lights, two girls in the middle of the auditorium got up and started making their way past the other students, trying to get out of the row. They weren't all that quiet about their exit, and the teacher stood up and called up to them, "Can you girls see okay?"

She got up and walked over the podium, and turned off the movie. "I'll just turn these lights back on until you're gone." She flicked the switch, and the girls practically fell over themselves trying to get out of the row and run up the stairs. I was in the back row at the top of the auditorium, so I could hear their horrified, embarrassed moans as they literally ran out the door. It was pretty much the funniest thing ever.

This Friday, the last day of class, before she handed out the final, she wrote a name on the blackboard, Mei-Hsuan Huang, and asked if anyone could tell her the gender of the person with the name. I recognized the name as the piano player of a concert I had attended and written a paper about, so I, and a few other people, raised our hands and answered female.

She went on, saying that this was a young woman on staff at the school and she had played the piano in the ISU Symphony Orchestra a couple weeks before. She told us that Mei-Hsuan was a very lovely young woman, and in fact someone had actually written in their paper about how beautiful she was. (She may have been talking about my paper...)

She continued, "If you had seen her that night, dressed in a lovely pink dress, there would be no doubt in your mind that she was a woman. Nevertheless, in TWO different papers reviewing the concert, people wrote that they had entered the auditorium, sat down and watched a MAN come onstage and sit down at the piano. Needless to say, those papers received an F."

The whole class cracked up laughing at this. Well, probably most of the class. I'm going to guess that the two people who wrote those papers weren't laughing.

This class was by far my favorite, and most of it had to do with my teacher. The subject matter, the history of music, dance, theater, and movies, was all interesting, but it was her engaging style of teaching, and the fact that she was just so cheerful and funny, that made me enjoy the class so much. She could have taught a math class and made me love it.

Teachers are everything. I really hope I get teachers next year that are at least half as good as she was. :)

So Busy

As most of you know, I went Chicago a month ago. I got tons of pictures, and I wrote plenty of notes in my journal to use for a whole bunch of blog posts. But I have not yet had time to do anything with them.

When I got back from Chicago I had less than a week to pack up my stuff and move to Ames for school. When I got to Ames I had to work at the grocery store I transferred to. Then I had to attend Destination Iowa State to get me oriented to the campus and to be able to find my way around. Then it was time for school.

All this week I have been so busy with school and work, that I barely have time for anything else. I think I'm busier than I ever have been in my entire life. Monday I have classes from 9 to 3. Wednesday it is 8 to 3. Friday it is just 9 to 11, but then I expect I will regularly have to work afterwards. Tuesday and Thursdays are my easiest days, with classes between 2 and 4:30. But none of these times are quite representative of how long my day is, because you need to add on about an hour before and after each day for bus riding times. Not to mention the fact that I could get scheduled for work after any one of these days.

For homework in three different classes I will be required to attend a number of plays, musical performances, movies, and other cultural events, and then write papers on them. For my drawing class I am supposed to be spending at least 6 hours OUTSIDE of class drawing, each week. For two classes I have to write journal entries at least twice a week on different topics, and all of this stuff has not yet taken into account all the reading I have to do.

In addition to all these school activities that I have to do, I went and joined three different student organizations. The bloggers club, the design club, and the ISU Theater group, as a set painter. Hopefully none of the times that these organizations meet will clash with any other time that I'm already busy.

So as you can see, that doesn't leave a whole lot of extra time, but I will do my best to keep up with this blog. I want to get a post done about Destination Iowa State first, and then I really need to get caught up on my blogging from my Chicago trip. It has already been a month since then! It hardly seems possible, but this month has just flown by. Tomorrow is Labor Day, so I don't have school, but I do have to work. I will try to get some writing done between now and then, and maybe I can get a post up in a day or two.