The Song About Getting a Degree
Last year, at an ice cream shop in the Outer Banks, a song came on the speakers that opened with a young woman announcing she'd gone to school and gotten a degree. I immediately pulled out my phone.
The song was "Chaise Longue" by Wet Leg, a band from the Isle of Wight. It opens like this:
Mommy, daddy, look at me I went to school and I got a degree All my friends call it "the big D" I went to school and I got the big D
I spend my days thinking about how young people get to and through college, and I cannot leave a cafe without Shazam-ing whatever's on the speakers. So when a deadpan British art-rock song opened with a kid presenting her degree to her parents like a golden retriever dropping a tennis ball at their feet, I was hooked before the second line. Straight into my Spotify it went.
If you know the song, you know the "big D" is doing some cheeky double duty. Wet Leg wink the whole way through, and half the fun is watching them keep a straight face. But strip the wink away and you get something almost tender. A kid, degree in hand, turning to the people who raised her. Mommy, daddy, look at me. Underneath the irony, that's the most honest thing a lot of eighteen-year-olds are actually feeling.
Cut to this morning. I'm on the treadmill, going nowhere at four miles an hour, and YouTube decides I should watch Wet Leg's set from Bonnaroo. There's Rhian Teasdale, pink hair, turning "Chaise Longue" into a giant call-and-response, a whole field shouting "Excuse me? What?" back at her. There it was again. The song about getting a degree, roaring out of a crowd of tens of thousands who were absolutely not thinking about the FAFSA.
Has that ever happened to you, where two of the worlds you live in collide when you're not looking? We keep our lives in separate drawers. The work drawer, the music drawer, the parenting drawer. Every so often something reaches across and reminds you they were never really separate.
So the college counselor in me can't help himself.
"Chaise Longue" is about the gap between how a milestone is supposed to feel and how it actually feels. A lot of families arrive at senior year performing the milestone before they've felt it. The acceptance, the sweatshirt, the announcement post. The thing you hold up and say look at me. Nothing wrong with the sweatshirt, but it was never the point, and everybody kind of knows it. That's the joke the song is telling on all of us. The real question is whether the kid grew into the person holding the degree, whether "look at me" is a performance or a genuine arrival. That's a harder thing to Shazam.
The goal was never just to get the degree like the kid in the song. It's to come out the other side as someone who can hold the thing up, look at me, and mean it without needing anyone to clap. That's the version I want for every student I work with. The degree and the sense of humor. The arrival and the wink.
Anyway. If you see me on a treadmill going nowhere with a very stupid grin on my face, now you know why.