A vent about my pinning ceremony fiasco!!!

[sarahsmile44]

I graduated last week (yay!) and the pinning ceremony, which is a HUGE deal for us as students, was a total fiasco. When we all started arriving at the venue, we were told that the coordinator of the ceremony accidentally put the wrong name on the permit for the venue and that our venue was already booked for another event that night!!! So...all of us and our families got turned away and told that we needed to drive 15 minutes to another part of the city for the 'new' venue. We get there and the auditorium there only holds 750 people. We had over 1,500. After we arrived at the new venue, they sprung it on us that instead of the 6 guests each that we were allowed to have, now we could only have TWO!!! Nevermind that our families were already ALL THERE!!! The handicapped access was locked, so my husband had to haul my wheelchair-bound stepdad up 16 stairs into the auditorium and back down 12 stairs to find him a place to park his chair. They crammed all of us into a band room to wait to line up for pinning. They used a band room and the cafeteria for "overflow" standing for our families, who attempted to watch the ceremony on 19" blurry t.v.'s, which would have been better than nothing IF they had gotten the live feed to work...which they didn't.

The photographer who was supposed to get our graduation photos and class composite wasn't able to because there was not a place for him to set up. So, our class will be the only class that does NOT have a class graduate composite photo on the wall in our school.

To top that off, the coordinator (who also happens to be one of the meanest and nastiest instructors we have) yelled at our families and cracked jokes about the fiasco, up at the podium. NEVER OFFERED AN APOLOGY...not even a peep of "I'm sorry".

Anyway...it's over now. I got pinned. Luckily, my family and I got there early and although they had to sit separate, they all got to see because they refused to give up their seats (some drove from TN to MI for this!) and I received a Clinical Excellence Award.

Thanks for putting up with my vent!!

[GitanoRN, BSN, MSN, RN]

first of all congratulations!!! on your accomplishment. however, i'm truly sorry that the pinning ceremony was spoiled for you and your other fellow students. needless to say, the responsible party for this malfunction event should have admitted their mistake, at least by honoring up to it the outcome would have been more tolerable. i wish you the very best in all of your future endeavors...aloha~

[~PedsRN~, BSN, RN]

Congrats on the pinning!!!! :)

I swear, I feel like sometimes nursing schools are so disorganized. We didn't have a fiasco like that, but I felt sometimes that I was organizing more of my stuff than the school was. LOL!