#class day

Princeton University's Cannon Exercises, ca. 1897.

Cannon Exercises were once part of Commencement Week celebrations, and happened on Class Day. Students would gather for lighthearted speeches, then smoke clay pipes and smash them against the cannon (a relic of the Revolutionary War's Battle of Princeton, which is "planted" upright on Cannon Green behind Nassau Hall). Here, you can see the cannon decorated with flowers for the occasion.

-tsk. c'mon!  still half the day left.

-wait, just a second. 

-Alex!

-

I started reading @omgcheckplease while I was still in high school, and I remember rereading it from my top bunk bed in my tiny room my freshman year of Yale and getting more and more excited as I recognized the similarities— that’s when I searched Ngozi and found out she was a Yale alum.

Now, today, reading Class Day, it’s 100% pure Yale (except in Harvard colors): the crowd scene which is so clearly set on Yale’s Old Campus, where our Class Day is held, with its criss-crossing paths and the dorms in the background...

...and the funny hats! Yale tradition is to wear funny hats (that usually mean something to you and are often hand-made or -decorated) instead of the formal graduation cap. Bitty’s wearing his hockey helmet, of course, and we see a few other students’ headwear in the above frame and in the two below:

It makes me happy to notice all these little details I can connect with as a Yale student, but it’s also more meaningful than I could have predicted even a few months ago. Because I’m class of 2020, so I won’t have an in-person graduation this year. Reading the Class Day update was kind of emotional but also such a gift.

People gathered for Class Day, The University of Iowa, 1916

Creator: Kent, Frederick W.

Carla Harris (MBA 1987), vice chairman, managing director, and senior client advisor at Morgan Stanley and a member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers, will be Harvard Business School’s (HBS) Class Day keynote speaker on Wednesday, May 23, 2018. The ceremony, which will take place on the Baker Lawn on the School’s campus in Boston, will also include a welcome from the co-presidents of the MBA Class of 2018, presentations of the Alumni Achievement Awards and Faculty Teaching Awards, and a student address.

Although Princeton University was not officially so named until 1896, it was pretty common for people to refer to the College of New Jersey as Princeton College well before then. Here, we see an early example of Princeton’s vibrant orange, too, though in the 1870s a much lighter, yellowish shade was also commonly seen. Here, an orange “P” and “C” for Princeton College intertwine in orange with the numeral “70″ for the Class of 1870 on an invitation to their Class Day exercises. Adrian Hoffman Joline, Class of 1870, kept this in his scrapbook.

Tiger Tuesday: The cover of the Princeton Class of 1891′s Class Day program, June 8, 1891.

Princeton University Class Records (AC130), Box 29