Bonus: My graduation day in (many) pictures

Me: “I’m twenty-four!” The boyfriend: “Roll for deception and add your modifiers.” (A/N it’s a DnD thing)

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It’s my birthday! Yaay! To celebrate I’d like to share a special Throwback Thursday kind of post.

I know, it’s a Wednesday at best, but timezones hit hard when you’re into the future like us on the Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Let’s collectively pretend it’s a Thursday in March, and it’s 2014. We’re in Bologna, Italy. It’s my graduation day.

Every depiction of a graduation day I’ve ever seen in movies portrayed rows of black gowns and tasselled caps thrown in the air. For the longest time, I thought that was what a Uni graduation looked like everywhere. I’m sorry to disappoint, you will not find a solemn queue of students shaking the Dean’s hand here. Italian graduations are far more peculiar and, if I were the Dean, I would stay very far too.

None of this happens in Italy. Courtesy of Canva PRO.

I handed in my thesis on aesthetic philosophy months prior, and there was nothing for me to do other than participate in random awards and challenges with my non-existent blogging community. The task was to document a day in my life. The day happened to be my graduation day.

I am glad I took photos of everything or I’d have forgotten most events that occurred after the first bottle of wine. Spoiler alert.

It all started with me writing a thesis titled: Personal Beauty. The idea came to me while I was studying in England the year prior so I’d been thinking, studying and dreaming about aestheticism in human form for nearly two years.

Graduation days, in Italy, are scattered and approximate. I didn’t even graduate with my classmates.

I was given a date, a time, and a location. In my case, the location was a simple lecture room on the top floor of one of my Uni buildings. The thing that would happen in that room is the final exam: the defence of your thesis. A twenty-minute to an hour-long presentation, where you demonstrate knowledge of your work and your field as a whole.

I booked an overnight stay at a nearby Air BnB with my mother to avoid any last-minute road catastrophe. That meant an easy morning. Or so I thought.

The nerves kicked in as I sat down waiting for my turn. Less than 10 other students were attending this graduation session. Some had family and friends with them, others were alone. One by one, they all walked into the room and came out celebrating.

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard about someone not graduating if they reached their graduation day. The overall graduation score is a mix of your average exam totals through the years and your thesis score. While single exams, often oral, are scored subjectively by each professor, graduation scores have official brackets, so students have a rough idea of where they’ll land.

Then, it was my turn to walk in, followed by my small entourage.

In the room, I was sitting in front of a panel of professors, chaired by the one who mentored my dissertation. Many asked questions or expressed their philosophical ideas on beauty. I doubt they had read the whole thing. At one point, I even said ‘I beg to differ, but beauty is seldom perfection’ and I heard my mother gasp behind me. After what felt like an eternity and the blink of an eye, everyone was asked to wait outside while the panel agreed on the grading.

After 10 minutes or so, we walked back into the room. Rumour says, if the professors were all standing, it meant it was a top grade: Summa cum Laude.

My professors were all standing.

I was officially a doctor (in philosophy)! And I was also officially unemployed!

The formal part of the day was over. That also marked the last time I set foot in the building.

No limited tickets for family and friends, no white chairs on the grass, no official photos, no Dean, no Valedictorian speech, no gowns and no funny hats. Actually, we wear crowns made of bay leaves. Literal laurel wreaths. Arguably considered funny hats unless you’re graduating or ruling the Roman Empire.

During the months I studied in Bologna, I often walked past a fancy patisserie and marvelled over their perfect single-portion cakes with perfect glazing and golden foil details. Back then, even finding macarons or cupcakes was a real challenge. Cakes like this were novel, exciting, and outside my student budget. All I asked my mother, for my graduation, was to reserve a table at that cafe to celebrate. None of my friends had ever been there, and I wanted to thank them for coming with a surprise dessert.

They ended up surprising me with the best graduation present. Especially now that I had plenty of time to watch TV. They knew me well.

Those same friends who spoiled me on this special day quickly pulled me aside to layer fabric, old clothes, and a dusty white baroque wig on me. Those were definitely things I would not have worn and didn’t match my aesthetic narrative. Alas, traditions are traditions!

Graduates are often dressed up in more or less embarrassing fashions, sometimes they are thrown flour and eggs, and sometimes they are glued to bottles of wine. I was lucky, in that regard! That’s when my family’s job to keep me focussed was done, and thought it best to leave us partying. They also took my precious rolled-up degree home safely. Who knows where it’d be otherwise?

It is tradition for friends to write a ‘papyrus’, a long poem about the new doctor’s life with jokes and epic episodes. Mine was all in rhyme and every time I misread or mispronounced a word I had to take a sip out of the bottle of wine that was optimally always within reach.

All graduates wear the customary crown but the colour of the ribbon holding it together is based on your faculty. Mine, for Philosophy, was white. It’s also common knowledge that taking a leaf from someone who graduated before you would bring you academic luck.

We kept celebrating throughout the afternoon with more embarrassing games, happy hour, architecture and history appreciation. One of the games was something out of a twisted Tumblr fantasy, even I couldn’t solve it, but luckily (for me, not for him) I noticed a guy who looked like Joseph Gordon Levitt and thought it would be perfect if I ran after him, with my attire and entourage, to ask him for help with the game and to tell him he looked like an actor. Looking at the photo, now, I am surprised to notice he did not, in fact, look like the actor at all.

Since my family abandoned me in Bologna, my friends had to squeeze me, my papyrus, my rags, and my tired drunken doctor self onto a car and drive me home.

I managed to take a few more pictures, the last for the day. And what a day!

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I hope you enjoyed seeing the non-touristy side of Bologna through this very traditional graduation celebration. Is this how other European countries celebrate their graduation?¹

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1. If you documented your graduation with photos like I did, consider yourself ‘tagged’! I challenge you to share your cultural experience in a post for your international audience.