Two weeks ago, I joined my cohort of M Arch students for our
graduation ceremony at the Nourse Hall in San Francisco. It was the kind of communal celebration of
completion that I had never experienced, despite my having now five (good
grief!) post-high-school degrees.
Our cohort of 23 students was thrilled to have scaled our
personal Everest. In the prior few weeks
we had defended our theses and presented our work to the juries. We finished our coursework, and some of us
completed our internships (check, check, check). In joy and exhaustion, bedecked in our artsy berets
and our pink striped hoods, we unceremoniously processed to a Klezmer band’s
rendition of Pomp and Circumstance.
I doubt that I will see many of my young colleagues again,
or even keep in touch with more than a few, but we accomplished something very
special together. And we whooped, leaped, hugged, and broadly
grinned in the marvelousness of it all.
For me, the architecture program has been an enormous
undertaking. It has required a kind of
blinders and tenacity that I became increasingly doubtful I possessed. But I made it, using up three years of my
dwindling life in the process. There is
a lot for me to digest here, and in the coming summer weeks, I’m hoping to do
just that.
