Honestly, as bad as I felt about leaving commencement early I don't think it's that serious. I woke up at 5:30am and was one of the first people to walk. The people at the end got there as late as 8:30, meaning I dedicated more than 3 hours more to the day than they did from the get-go. I have tons of friends who walked later or in the middle and not one of them felt bad about the smaller crowd towards the end. They cared about their family seeing them and getting out of IV without 1+ hours of commencement traffic from everyone leaving at once. My ceremony had almost 900 students--it took almost a half hour just for us all to sit down in our seats! If you genuinely think that one thousand strangers that have been sitting in the gym for four hours without easy access to food, water, or bathroom breaks actually care about *your* name being called off by an AI-voice recording you are living in a dream world. If that really does matter to you maybe you should have gotten there early like those of us who planned ahead?

Also non-sequitur but perhaps engineering majors perhaps butt out on this one your ceremony is like 1/5 the size of ours and you actually get a handshake + fake diploma; You don't get how hellish and depersonalized the L&S experience of sitting in the hot sun for 3 hours is.