My Zoom graduation felt like both a creepy, post-apocalyptic exercise and a corny, semi-pointless ritual.
Less than three months ago, I started having this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It started in early March when Harvard announced that it would finish the rest of its semester online. A few other schools quickly followed suit. At my school, Vassar College, the administration emailed us to say that we would be going online for a few weeks and returning to in-person classes in April.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table with my housemates and laughing at the prospect of a virtual semester. “What’s the school going to do, give us a Zoom graduation?” my friend Megan joked. “Have us click and drag our avatar across the stage to get our diploma?”
My mother insisted I come home until in-person classes started again, so I packed a backpack and made the trek to Virginia. Soon after, I received the string of emails that would seal my fate: The first informed students that Vassar would finish classes online, the second told us that we could not return to campus to retrieve our belongings, and then there was a third note, including a link to our virtual commencement.
At first, the idea of missing out on this milestone felt very unfair. The thought of not being able to have a proper farewell with the friends who had become my lifeline over four years was painful to even entertain. But as weeks passed and more tragedy occurred, it felt foolish to be preoccupied with the logistics of my graduation while a virus that has killed over 300,000 people silently rages.
As commencement day approached, I found myself thinking of a Zoom graduation as a creepy, post-apocalyptic exercise on bad days and as a corny, semi-pointless ritual on good ones. I was never really looking forward to it but recognized that it was better than nothing. It happened this past weekend. And from a technical standpoint it was well executed, but it was also sadder than I thought it would be, sitting without my friends, attending the ceremony not in a cap and gown but in my pajamas, sitting on my mom’s couch.
My friend Heather, the senior class president, had a different attitude. As soon as Vassar announced there would be a virtual graduation ceremony, she emailed the school offering to help plan it. For two months, she was in Zoom meetings arranging the event. And this summer, well after our coursework is done, she’ll be attending meetings to plan Vassar’s in-person graduation, meant to take place sometime in 2021.
“When I first heard the news about a virtual graduation, I cried my eyes out,” Heather told me in a text the other day. But the pain from missing out on a traditional commencement only pushed her to make the best of what we were left with. “Especially as a Vietnamese, first-generation, and low-income student, I had been looking forward to my college graduation for a very long time and was excited about the prospect of celebrating this moment with my family who had already booked their flights to New York,” she said.
There are tens of thousands of students like Heather. And yet other students have been relieved by the lack of physical pomp this season. Many differently abled people, for example, prefer the accessibility that a virtual graduation provides.
“As a woman in a wheelchair, a virtual graduation took away a lot of the logistical questions and planning I would normally have to coordinate,” Heather Tomko, who just graduated remotely from the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “Often, stages aren’t easily wheelchair accessible, or if they are, it’s through a side or back door that wouldn’t allow me to process in with everyone else.”
Virtual ceremonies do have upsides: With no travel required, even the most far-flung, busy or financially disadvantaged family members can attend. The enormous downside, however, is the totally isolating nature of these events. For most of us, even the best-executed online graduation can’t measure up to the thrill of in-person hugs — or the iconic moment of everyone tossing their caps and tassels into the air.
Because of this, some graduates are ditching the virtual ceremonies and finding other ways to celebrate. Aiden Strawhun, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, told me their friends played hooky on their virtual graduation day and hosted a separate online party instead.
“I hosted a livestream of some of my friends and I ‘graduating’ in Animal Crossing,” they said in an email, referencing the video game that has become a hit in this quarantine era, where you build a society on an animated isle of paradise. “I spent a whole month making a stage and party area in-game and getting us all little outfits too! That was much more healing for me.”
Efforts like Aiden’s aren’t just fun; they’re truly heartwarming. But it’s impossible not to recognize the bittersweetness of all these contingency plans. Since Vassar moved online, I’ve gone on weekly FaceTime dates with friends and, like many, attended a Zoom birthday party. I still did Dollar Beer Night, a Thursday night Vassar tradition that went virtual this spring, as we tried to hold on to a sense of community and normalcy. Still, while it’s always nice to see my friends’ faces, I can’t help fixating on the awkwardness of screens or the anxieties these almost-normal interactions can induce. And as the public health effort to “flatten the curve” has transitioned to mostly staying at home until a vaccine arrives, I’ve begun to wonder: Is this what hanging out with friends will be like forever now?
I couldn’t bring myself to be excited about graduation, which usually marks the start of a promising future. Instead, we’re beginning adult life in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression by some measures. As an aspiring journalist, for me it has been particularly frightening — graduating as about 36,000 journalists have been fired or furloughed, or had their pay reduced because of the coronavirus crisis, many of them seasoned veterans. It seems every time I log onto Twitter another writer I admire has been laid off.
My plans to move out after graduation have been put on hold indefinitely. I’ve moved back in with my mother instead. And many of my friends have lost jobs or fellowships in the past few months and are struggling to find remote work.
Commencement felt like the last moment of calm before being pushed out into an unpredictable and uncontrollable storm. Sometimes I wonder whether the class of 2020 was star-crossed from the start, starting college with President Trump’s election and graduating into the twin crises of a public health emergency and profound economic despair.
Ultimately, what’s most painful to me is not that I won’t get to walk across the stage — it’s that I won’t achieve the finality that the ritual represents. I didn’t know three months ago that I’d gossiped for the last time on my friend Yume’s couch or that my friend Zoya and I had our last midnight Taco Bell splurge on her living room floor.
Even normal graduations don’t provide closure, but the performance of it. The real blessing of the ceremonies is their knowledge and appreciation of last times. When I think back on this moment in life, I’ll never wonder “What if I had my commencement ceremony?” I’ll just wish that I got to hug my friends goodbye, knowing that it would be our last embrace for a while.
