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Fifth-year English student Nina Villavin gets some help from her friend Lauren Kamantigue as she

Walking across a temporary stage in Pauley Pavilion as the names of 2,000 classmates scroll across the Jumbotron isn’t exactly a picture of pomp and circumstance for every UCLA grad.

While graduation ceremonies mark the end to years of mastering math equations, memorizing chemical formulas, and dealing with those lines at the Ackerman post office, ceremonies also serve as the last step before college students stop being students and confront the realities of life off campus.

But of the approximately 3,500 undergraduates who will have their degrees conferred in June, only a fraction are expected to participate in the College of Letters & Science ceremony – the largest on campus, expected to draw 8,000 people. Of those who are walking, many say they’re doing it under pressure from camera-toting family members, and not because the formality is important to them.

It is not as if there are so many students staying away that Westwood might be lonely. An estimated 8,000 will attend the UCLA College commencement on June 18, and reservations for the UCLA Guest House were booked a year ago for that weekend. But at a university where many of this year’s graduates fought for admission four years earlier, now they just want to get out.

Fed up with the crowds and limited supply of tickets on hand for the College commencement, some are abandoning it altogether in favor of smaller departmental ceremonies.

Annie Choi, a fourth-year sociology student, said she will be attending the department’s ceremony instead of the College one, which she calls “too big.”

Choi admits that students might not feel the same sense of transition after college as they did after high school – contributing to a sense of ambivalence about participating in any ceremony at all. Still, Choi, who compared the day to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays combined, said she won’t miss it.

“I can’t imagine not participating,” she said.

The only bad thing, she concedes, is that she has one more class to finish after summer school.

In contrast to the dullness of the larger College commencement holds for some students, the ceremonies for individual departments appeal to many.

Miguel Arambula, a fourth-year international development studies student, will be walking in the ceremony for the International Institute, but not the ceremony for the UCLA College. He is uninterested in the latter ceremony because he said it “would be boring – too big, too general.”

But others, some under pressure from relatives who are flying to Los Angeles from out of town, don’t see the big deal. David Strich, a fourth-year history student, appreciates the significance of graduation even though he will be walking for his parents.

“I’m graduating for myself but the ceremony is for them. It’s the one time they get to see what I’ve done,” he said.

Chi Leed, a third-year transfer student studying electrical engineering, said he too will attend his graduation ceremony because his parents want him to.

Sometimes, commencement circumstances are a bit more twisted.

President Bush missed the commencement ceremonies for 22-year-old twin daughters Jenna and Barbara, who graduated from the University of Texas and Yale University, respectively, in May. Jenna graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, Barbara in humanities.

First Lady Laura Bush attended Yale’s university-wide commencement and a smaller ceremony for Barbara’s residential college.

Aides have said President Bush decided to skip his daughters’ graduations because their presence and that of White House security would be disruptive.

Jenna Bush simply “decided she didn’t want to go to the ceremony. No other reason,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for Laura Bush.

He added that it is fairly common for students at large universities to skip commencement. For Saturday night’s university-wide ceremony, which includes general recognition of the school’s entire graduating class of 8,061, only about 3,000 students sought tickets.

There is some family precedent. The first lady skipped the ceremonies when she earned her master’s degree in library science at the University of Texas in 1973.

The university is the largest campus in the country and several thousand students were scheduled to graduate. English students graduated in one of several smaller ceremonies on campus.

Parental pressure is an imposing factor for some students, but others arrange their graduation ceremony attendance according to their own interests.

And while some students find graduation ceremonies monotonous, others take advantage of them as an opportunity to celebrate their collegiate accomplishments.

“I wanted to walk because I didn’t graduate high school, so it’s my first time graduating,” said Ronak Kavian, a fourth-year neuroscience student.

Though she takes pride in walking, she said that most of her friends do not seem to care about it.

“A lot of people just do it for their families,” she said.

With reports from Bruin wire services.