One of the first thoughts I had as I was on the line to graduation is that I would make a very bad woman. Lacking any sort of pockets you had to reach under your dress gown to get anything in your pants. It’s a lot less graceful during a graduate procession when it looks like you're inserting a tampon.

At the end of a long road of study and travel for most students, graduation is generally a big deal. Thousands of people crammed inside the Prudential Center all waving and expecting their kids to recognize them. From the distance where I sat, it looked like the crowd was a sea of undulating, unfocused jelly beans. “Mom, you can’t be in the corner seat, the stage is round!” I heard one girl scream in a conversation, trying to locate her parents. William Paterson decided to wing it with graduation and with little practice, managed to pull it off very well despite the chaos of organizing over 2,000 students and even more parents and family. I didn’t even see my own family - they were of course positioned in the second floor behind me. In addition, my brother in law got into an argument with a police officer providing security on the floor as he tried to get closer to take pictures. That was the second time my family had a run in with security as before when I first entered the center you had to have one of several metal detectors run over you. In an attempt to help the operator I put my arms out and accidentally hit the woman in the face.

Truthfully, the most difficult part of graduation wasn’t the excitement of being done with school, nor the pride of achieving a degree. No, it was in fact finding a place to pee. As I searched fruitlessly for a place to empty my bladder full of excitement and orange juice I realized that I was akin to a passenger on April 15, 1912 aboard Titanic, realizing there weren't enough lifeboats. All the backstage bathrooms at Prudential Center were single rooms, couple that with the several thousand students and you had a recipe for Great Depression-esque bread lines.

In addition, I realized everyone had a better cap than I did. The thought of decorating the graduation cap is for, whatever reason, something that had completely eluded me up to that point. One girl I remember distinctly had somehow wired her cap to light up. I was jealous.

On the subject of the graduation decorum, I still don’t know what that's called, and I cannot forgive the directions for stating, “Assemble like a dorsal fin.” I can’t do that William Paterson, because surprisingly I have little experience with being a dolphin. There was a strange neck thing you wore that ended up looking like the hoods the students wore in "Harry Potter," but much less functional. There were several phases of workers specifically in line as students lined up to help anyone who couldn’t figure it out.

We must have sat in the room for about two hours, which is four hours shorter than I thought, but I’m a glass half-empty kind of person. Corey Booker, a Senator for New Jersey, spoke at the commencement address. It wasn’t a bad speech by any means and overall I thought it was quite good. However, I couldn’t get over the fact that he looked like Keegan Michael Key from "Key and Peele" and I thought at any second, his speech would break out into a skit.

Now recently my phone battery has been in the about to break up with me phase, in that it continually lies to me. The battery gets down to about 50 percent, and then suddenly dies. To make sure I had enough power to contact my family after the enormous ceremony ended, I had to ration my phone battery power by constantly switching to airplane mode like I was on a desert island and trying to stretch the power as far as I could. Graduating has a lot in common with being at the DMV, a great deal of sitting and waiting. I still had to pee by the way. I hadn’t realized you could just get up and go before it was too late. Like a tragic hero of Greek legends, I was assigned to a terrible fate. William Paterson has an unspoken hatred for the Humanities as we were one of the last groups to go.

Finally, I reached the podium where I received the leather degree holder. I found out evidently you don't actually get your degree at graduation - you get the box it comes in. There was a lot of hand shaking and a bunch of awful pictures by professional photographers. I’m not a photogenic person, there’s a reason my profile picture is something else. Regardless, I got my degree and headed down the stairs. I then immediately became lost because there wasn’t an exact path to follow. I began to follow a random girl because I thought she was leaving and ended up following her back to the wrong section where she sat down and I realized I goofed.

Finally managing to navigate the maze of chairs, I made my way outside (hitting the bathroom first), where I stood waiting for my parents. In my phone's death throes, I had managed to get a text to my parents to meet me out in the front of the building before it died. I stood in the rear entrance for about 20 minutes before realizing it wasn’t the front of the building and receiving one last angry text from my sister demanding where I was. As a final incident to the day, as I worked my way around the building, accidentally destroying three photos in the process, I dropped my diploma holder on the sidewalk, covering it in dirt and bending up the corners.

If graduation was meant to set my expectations for the rest of my life, at least I’ll have a lot to talk about.