The COVID Diaries: Can I Graduate?

I write this to all graduates this year, but especially those who have slaved an extra eight to twelve years earning a doctoral degree. I have empathy for the effort and struggle you have endured. As my former study-buddy (a Marine NCO) used to say, "It's like getting F*cked up the @ss with a corncob and having to say thank you for the privilege." Especially if school didn't come easy for you, or you paid your own way one class at a time, or if you're somehow a first in your family and had to navigate the social path (and all those strange new terms and rules) on your own.
You were likely looking forward to skipping across the stage in some seriously hotter-than-sin formal regalia, complete with an unflattering hat of Cambridge or Oxford design. Some of you skipped walking for your undergrad degrees and master's degrees, saving money and family travel for the big one...the one that really matters...the last one you planned to do. I hope you all still get the pomp and circumstance in person someday, even if delayed. But even if you don't, I offer you my heartfelt congratulations and appreciation.
I also offer one bit of hard-won wisdom from my own strut across that stage in velvet. I thought that would be the day I finally felt it was done. I thought that would feel like a big victory. I was wrong. The surge of pride and a real feeling of victory and meaning to the struggle was NOT that day, or even the first day someone called me Doctor Schmidt, or even the first day I received my 1,000 new business cards with the Ph.D. on them, or even the day I got my first seriously real-doctor-job paycheck. Turns out the day that felt like graduation was really the day I first had to pull out all of those fancy new intellectual tools and use them to make lives better...something I was only able to do because I endured and persisted and kept practicing perfecting my learning well after the rented velvet robes were all returned. I think your big day is now to come because you were also brave and bold enough to persist in learning and now it's a bone-deep habit. Congratulations! You came, you learned, and you will soon conquer your first of many challenges in making the world work better. No matter how you celebrate it this year, allow yourself to feel the free fall into your most-amazing potential. Graduation is just a very brief welcome to the best adventure of your life. Dum vivimus vivamus, and God Speed!

Even without the monkey suit, you still win (maybe more so because you can pick your own ceremonial robes that you look cool in now).

*Note: The title of this post is borrowed from a Third-Eye Blind song, "Graduate." I used to sing it to myself a lot as I spent night after night running stats programs in SAS for my research (back when a comma out of place might mean another 4 hours to fix and rerun your analysis...Yes, I know I am old.).