The Leiningers: a few graduation pictures

I will probably do another post with more pictures from this weekend, with all the fun we've had with the Leiningers visiting, but here are a few official graduation pictures from this weekend. So it's official! Tommy is a doctor! You may now call him Dr. Leininger, as he now prefers to be known. Or Dr. MC (Dr. Miracle Child, a family running joke with the Leiningers).

I feel like people talk about doing a PhD like it's this crazy difficult time in your life, something that you have to suffer through in order to get to the good stuff afterwards. But I really feel like these four years here in Durham, and Tommy's four years studying here at Duke, have been anything but difficult. We have lived a charmed life the last four years, being able to take vacation as much as we want (a big trip to visit both our families at Christmas and in the summer, plus smaller trips on our own if we wanted), Tommy being able to work from home and spend lots of time with Dane, and still being able to work hard and get stuff done with his advisor. I know there has been a lot more stress involved on Tommy's side than mine with this PhD (haha), and there have been periods with a lot lot LOT of work (like the last few months leading up to his thesis defense), but I know he agrees with me here that it hasn't been as hard as people make it sound. I know that we are totally lucky in this situation and I am grateful everything we've experienced has gone so smoothly. So we go into this graduation feeling relieved and grateful and happy--and oh so proud of everything Tommy has done!

There are a number of different ceremonies that are included in "graduation" at Duke, so we skipped some and went to others. The one major one that we went to was the PhD hooding ceremony, where all the graduating PhD students were hooded by their advisors (or given the sash/hood thing that signifies a doctorate). It took FOR-E-VER because there were over 200 PhD graduates being hooded. And Tommy's department was the absolute last one to go--Tommy was the fifth from the last student to be hooded! Tommy's advisor was actually out of the country so another member of his committee was the actual one who did the hooding. But we were so excited to watch it once the big moment came. And luckily, Greg has an amazing camera lens that allowed him to zoom in and get some good pictures (you wouldn't even know how far back we were sitting!).

We ended up skipping the main commencement/convocation ceremony on Sunday morning so that we could go to sacrament meeting and not torture ourselves with Dane at the Duke football stadium for several hours. We went to campus and took some pictures of Tommy with his robes in front of his building and with the chapel in the background.

We then went to the statistics department ceremony and watched Tommy get his actual diploma. There's the big deal! It was really nice that the stats department is so small, because they only had about 15 bachelor's degrees, 5 master's degrees, and 7 PhD degrees to give out. Each student had their advisor say something about him or her when they said their names, which was really neat.