Graduation and all that

The Spottiswooders

It all happened on Wednesday!! It felt very monumental, with everyone attired in gowns and hoods, a grand ceremony in McEwan Hall, a delicious lunch with mum, dad and Kate, and a champagne reception at the Royal College of Surgeons (another big old building).

It did feel quite special in that ceremony though, sitting amongst all my colleagues after all these years of (mostly, ok, some) hard work, hearing about all the achievements of Edinburgh graduates (the only one I can remember just now is Dunlop inventing the inflatable tyre) then going up there to have my degree conferred upon me by the principal - a process which involves having your name read out, getting touched on the head by the honourory hat (allegedally made from John Knox's breeches!) and him saying "well done on the first Daniel" :-D

And the highlight of the speeches, our "graduation joke", from the vice principal of Herriot-Watt, was: "Changing a University is like moving a graveyard, you don't get any help from the people inside". The best bit though was when someone was introducing IBM Nick and said managing change within IBM was "probably something else akin to moving a graveyard". This got mild, polite and slightly uneasy laughter.

Afterwards there were some cows and some champagne and some wine and some beer and some dancing.

Top Bananas

Top Bananas

Oh, I'm getting the subliminal AIESEC messages in at every opportunity :-) Also, Arthur's Seat is bloody windy. Alex and I went up there to shake off a hangover very effectively the other day. We played a good game of throw-the-banana-skins-off-the-top-and-see-how-many-tourists-you-can surprise before deciding to come down the hard way.

Causing erosion on the site where modern geology was founded, all part of a good day's work.

A couple days after that I ran up the side of the thing (ok, only along the bottom of the Crags, but the steep way). Almost killed me. Felt good though.

Daylight strikes

Perfect positioning

This was Cortney's last conscious moment after we left a club at about 7am and found this car that just had to be photographed!

It's been such a good couple weeks of reunitedness - Julie (from CA), Marco, Ullie, Nico, Till (from Germany/CA), Cortney (from Chicago/CA), Max and Alex (from Canterbury/CA) and James (from Edinburgh). Great catching up with folk. All these people better come visit in Venezuela next year!

Germany: Land of Ideas

Small people

All over Berlin at the moment they have these stupid big plastic sculptures getting in the way of all your nice tourist photos of the main attractions. But this giant car in front of Brandenburg Gate was pretty cool, and ideal for early morning photo opportunities.

As well as cars, Germany invented medicine and Einstein.

And Berlin is named after a bog (you do sometimes get a whiff of it); it doesn't mean "little bear" as some people are led to believe. It also means it's very, very flat. They have these bicycles lying around all over the place and you can phone a number to get a code to unlock them for a single journey, then you just pay a monthly subscription for it.

Almost as cool as the "scooter man" in Edinburgh. You call him out when you've had a drink and he comes along in his scooter, puts it in the back of your car and drives you home.

Done it!

Yey, I did it. University. After 5 years it is over. It feels very good. For maximum tension, we had to delve into the depths of JCMB (one last time maybe?) to go read the result on a noticeboard, labelled by examination number. And there in the "First Class Honours" section was my number (or at least something that looked very like it, I double checked about ten times!) Anyway it was :-D so very happy me, very happy parents, very happy company taking money off me for a highly silly gown :-)

So, what's next? Well, as Declan is constantly keen to put it, "they've shipped me off to a charity". Yes, I'm off to work for AIESEC for a year. After several applications to different countries (many of them possibly a bit last minute) I finally spent a good amount of time on one of them, got some amazing references together and got the job of MCVP External Relations in AIESEC Venezuela. The job will be excellent - leading an entire country's AIESEC presence within the national team - big national accounts, organising events, managing strategies for marketing, branding, alumni relations, etc. The country looks absolutely stunning. Yes, it's a bit politically and economically unstable (it's ok, I excel at staying out of trouble!) but it will be such an incredible cultural experience, such a difference from here. It will be challenging, it is a bit scary and I'm still not quite sure what to expect but I am sure it will be a fun and very experience-filled year! You've sometimes just got to jump into these things, and this is the time for it!

So on the agenda this month (now that all the extreme amounts of post-exam celebrating, drinking, reuniting and holidaying are over!) is:

• Lots of working at Shimmer to at least mostly pay back Inland Revenue (see Working Lunch on Tuesday for hopefully an inspiring shot of me discussing UML diagrams!)


• More vaccinations (only two more days of risk of Yellow Fever and MMR side-effects now!)


• Lots of planning for the year ahead in the MC


• Maybe squeeze in a bit of work for AIESEC in Edinburgh


• One chapter of Spanish per day, and maybe some more watching of Spanish movies with Jen

So it's going to go pretty fast, then I'll be off for another year abroad, which will be very different in every way to my year in California! I'll be sure to relight the blogging spark over there.

Dan Cunningham, graduand BSc and crazy travel plan maestro