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[betsbillabong]

Hi there,

I am graduating - finally! My family (parents divorced and both remarried, and two brothers) are coming to the celebrations. Two of them (stepfather and brother) can only come to one event - hooding or commencement (one is on monday, the other tuesday).

They had planned to come to hooding, but I am having a tough time coming up with tickets. Am wondering if it would be better just to invite them to commencement, or if hooding is really special and worth still trying to find tickets for. This whole hooding them feels very mysterious to me, I have to say...

Anyhow, any advice or anecdotes about your own experience would be helpful. Thanks!

BB

[juillet]

I'm just a first-year but this question was asked in another community elsewhere, and the general consensus was that the hooding is much more special and intimate than the commencement.  The hooding is when you really receive your honors for being a doctoral student, and it's more intimate than the commencement, as you'll likely be hooded by your advisor and/or other members of the faculty in your department.  The commencement is usually huge and impersonal and includes a lot of speakers you likely won't care about, and depending on how large your university is your name might not even be called individually.  (I know that at my university we supposedly are conferring degrees upon 12,000 students at our commencement and while the majority of them likely won't be present, the commencement is only 3 hours.  No way they're calling all of those names.  Instead, we have departmental or school graduation ceremonies that recognize the students individually.)

[watermarkup]

Will your name be called out individually, and will you walk across a stage, at either one of the events?

If both => then it doesn't matter which event they come to. The hooding might be more intimate--800 as opposed to 5000 people--but all but 30 seconds will be equally boring for them. Commencement might even have a more interesting speaker.

If neither => then it also doesn't matter.

If only at the hooding => then try to sneak them all in somehow.

[betsbillabong]

Thanks for your input. I keep hearing that hooding is more special, but no one in my department will even be around for either event, I don't think (at least not my two readers). It's at Princeton, and the outdoor ceremony is really pretty (though not personal) and outdoors (I hope! Praying for sun). The hooding ceremony is indoors, in a theater, the day before. I don't know, part of me just feels like the graduation ceremony itself feels more final, on a beautiful day. Probably it doesn't matter much.

Any other input?

[msparticularity]

I keep hearing that hooding is more special, but no one in my department will even be around for either event, I don't think (at least not my two readers).

??? Who is hooding you, if not your advisor?

Actually, at my doctoral institution the hooding and commencement happen together. It was great fun because I got to sit with my faculty mentors, and they came up to the front to hood me, then I walked across the podium and got my diploma. The other very cool part was that the faculty members from my department, and others who knew me, lined up on the other side, at the foot of the steps, to hug me and shake my hand.

We do that part here at my current institution, not just for our grads but also for the master's grads. Our master's students this year weren't expecting it, and they were so excited!

[hmaria1609]

Have you asked around for any spare tickets?  Surely someone isn't using all their tickets.  When I graduated from my master's program, I gave one away to my undergrad roomie.

[karmann]

I'm going to buck the conventional wisdom here and say go for the big commencement ceremony.  I graduated a week ago, only went to the departmental commencement/hooding ceremony (at my advisor's suggestion, since that's the only one he attends) and to me, it was pretty lame.  It also wasn't terribly shorter than the main commencement ceremony, and the main commencement speakers had to have been better than what we got (the guest speaker read an entire children's book out loud as his speech, and the dean's speech was all about how the economy sucks and none of us are going to have jobs). 

Even with all of those strikes against it, at least my hooding ceremony was specific to my department, and the whole faculty was there.  Some departments in my school don't have hooding ceremonies and leave it up to the grad school to host a big catch-all hooding ceremony for their grads.  Those are totally impersonal, with two random faculty members hooding everyone on an assembly line.  OP, it sounds like your hooding might be more like this, in which case I would definitely have them come to the main commencement instead.   

[prof_smartypants]

At my school, the "hooding" is a university wide event where all doctoral graduates get hooded by the dean of their school. Then, each school has their own commencement. I'm guessing this is similar to the OP's scenario.

[betsbillabong]

I'm following up here, just in case someone in the same situation is searching the thread next year.

Most of my family ended up coming to both hooding and commencement (I had to sneak some extra hooding tickets from someone else), and though I'm glad they came to both, I actually found that walking out the giant gate on commencement day was the bigger deal for me. It probably would have felt different, however, if faculty and advisor had been in attendance at hooding.

[kedves]

Thanks for the update.  I'm glad it was meaningful for you.  Best wishes!