By ET

 I got featured on the MIT commencement website.

Here is what they wrote for this:

"Michael Zhang was the very last student to receive his degree, a PhD in management, at MIT's Commencement exercises on Friday, June 9. He jumped for joy, turned around, bowed to the faculty and ran down the aisle with his hands in the air. "

 

This is truly a special moment for me. I never expected to be special as the "last one", it was a pleasant surprise.

To be the last one, a lot of conditions have to be met:

1. You have to have the right last name, in my case "Zhang" starts with "Z".
2. You have to be in the right school, in my case Sloan School is the last school to go up stage, I know there are at least 30 people with family names behind me (Zykov, Zollei, Zimmerman, Zimbardi, Zia, Zhu, Zhou, Zhao, Zherebchevskiy, etc), but they are not in Sloan.
3. You have to be getting the right degree, in my case it is PhD, my friend Zhu Yi's name is behind me but went up stage before me, because she was getting an MBA.
4. You have to have the right first name, Jieying Zhang, another friend of mine went up just before me, because my name "Xiaoquan" came after hers.  It's great that she also got featured on the commencement website, with her daughter.

I'll post some photos later.

 

One day before the commencement, there was the hooding ceremony, something special for PhD receipients.  Here is a link to the news story, they also interviewed me, here is an exerpt of the article:

 

Michael Zhang, new Ph.D. in management, will be a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology next fall, so he and his wife and their two daughters, Alantha, 4, and Ashley, 4 months, will move to Hong Kong after six years at MIT.

The Zhang family shared their fellow graduates' affection for the journey they shared while living at MIT. "Eastgate was a great community for us," Zhang said. 

 

[[update on June 14, 2006]] 

This photo got on the cover page of MIT newspaper: Tech Talk.  Together with the photos of Ben Bernanke (PhD 1979), chair of the federal reserve, and MIT President Susan Hockfield.

Download the Issue.

 

By ET This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 4:35 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.