Dear seniors graduating in May,

Don’t get too excited. Yes, you have worked for at least four years on your education. You have spent countless hours and sleepless night in the library. You’ve woken up at 7 a.m. to make an 8 a.m. class, and stayed in a classroom until the clock on the wall said 9:30 p.m.

Soon we will graduate. We will walk in our caps and gowns, shake hands with SMU President R. Gerald Turner and then… We will get a note saying our diploma will be mailed to us. So go ahead and tell Mom and Dad to forget the photo-op they’ve been waiting for; you don’t get a diploma. Apparently the handshake is just as good at a graduation ceremony.

Let’s just go ahead and ask the burning question: Why?

Well, as it turns out, the Registrars office doesn’t seem to have enough time to determine whether or not we are all officially graduating. They need more time to process our grades.

Here is our problem: Don’t our professors have some inkling as to whether or not we’re going to fail? And are we actually going to walk if our grades haven’t even been confirmed?

We aren’t saying the school is lazy, we understand people are busy. They are as busy as the hundreds of students in the library who have taken far too many Adderal and refuse to sleep for days on end because every minute of studying counts!

We spend more than $40,000 a year to attend this school. We get a great education; we put a lot into it. So how hard is it to give us a dinky piece of paper saying we got through it all? I don’t think the mailman will be quite as enthusiastic about our diploma, and it wont make nearly as good a photo-op.

We want our diplomas. Physically, they are just paper, but in the grand scheme of things our diplomas represent everything we have put into this school, which is a lot. So please, just give us our diplomas.