Why do we have to wait until April?

By Lauren Do Nascimento •

The year is coming to a swift end and for some students, our years at NSU are also coming to a close. Seniors are excited to spend the rest of the semester planning for graduation, but it’s not really over for some of us because there is no commencement ceremony for seniors who graduate in December. Those who plan on graduating in the fall will have to wait until the end of April to walk the stage, even though we’d already have graduated.

All of my expectations for graduation burst as I realized I have to wait until next semester to walk the stage. This is very unfair, especially considering my current circumstances. I expected to graduate last April, but due to personal reasons, I had to miss that semester and thus miss graduation. I was already forced to miss out on my last semester with friends and classmates, and I missed out on graduating with the people I’ve known for most of my time at NSU.

Now that I’m finishing up my degree this semester, I’ve gotten the opportunity to have different experiences and make new friends. I’m also more eager to graduate now because of the wait. It’s not fair for one graduating class to wait on another class in order to walk the stage.

It’s also very inconvenient for me, because I live almost an hour away, to have to come back six months after I finish classes for the ceremony. It’s even harder for those who live out of state or out of the country. We now have to block out this time to come back, when we should have already done this ceremony, and that’s assuming everyone can return and participate, which is unlikely.

Other colleges like FAU, UF and FIU offer undergraduate graduations in December for those who graduate early (or later, like in my case). It doesn’t make sense why NSU wouldn’t do the same thing, especially considering that we have the space to do it and we will already be having graduations for graduate students during that time. There are also no high school graduations during the end of the fall semester, which means that NSU wouldn’t have to divide the time and space with local high schools like they would in April.

Since I won’t have graduation until April, I’ll have to live my post-graduation life and think about everything other than graduation, only to be suddenly brought back here in order to get the peak of the “college experience.”

I, along with many other students, was already robbed of many college experiences because of the pandemic. This is starting to feel reminiscent of that time. I want to participate in graduation and then move on in my career, and I don’t like that I will have to stop, go back in time for a little bit, participate in commencement and then go back to my post-college mentality. This feels so random and unnecessary.

NSU has the right venue, the right time and enough people to host a commencement ceremony at the end of the fall. So why do we have to wait until April?

Lauren Do Nascimento is the managing editor of The Current.