Many students who remained on campus throughout the 2008 presidential race felt that there could have been no better way to ring in inauguration than with the hundreds of other Jumbos who gathered in Hotung and celebrated together on the quad.
Students studying abroad, however, participated in the election and subsequent celebration in rather different ways.
Watching state-by-state results on Election Day and the inaugural speech in January are decidedly American traditions. Students living in other countries during these events, however, got a chance to experience their native traditions in a foreign land due to the global attention focused on the election.
Graham Rogers, a junior currently studying in Madrid, watched the inauguration ceremony in the evening via the CNN Webcast with other American students.
"One of our professors let us put it on the big screen in class," Rogers said in an e-mail to the Daily. "I get the feeling they were really proud of us since Bush was incredibly unpopular over here and the group I'm with is pretty liberal, for the most part."
To Rogers and his classmates' dismay, the Webcast stopped functioning halfway through the ceremony due to too much internet traffic, but this didn't stop the group from taking in every moment of the celebration.
"One of the Spanish news stations played a tape of the ... ceremonies for the next 24 hours straight, so I got to see the whole ceremony in the end," Rogers said.
Katherine Sadowski, a junior currently studying in Paris, also had some difficulty watching the inauguration due to a different kind of traffic.
"For inauguration night, a bunch of us wanted to go out and do something fun," Sadowski said in an e-mail to the Daily. "We found a few American bars ... but they were so packed that we had to stand outside, and we couldn't hear anything ... We were lucky if we could see Obama."
Sadowski said that they eventually found a diner called The American Dream and managed to find a seat just as the inauguration began.
"We all toasted to Obama, and the French people around us cheered us along," Sadowski said. "When it came time to sing the national anthem, we all did so somewhat amusingly, and one of the waiters even held a fake microphone up to [my friend's] mouth."
For many students studying overseas last semester, the celebrations on election night were no less extravagant than they were in the United States.
Six time zones away in Prague, many American students rang in the election results at the Globe Café, a popular expatriate café and English bookstore that hosted an all-night election-viewing party.
With the time difference, the results weren't announced until almost six a.m. Many students stayed up all night, regardless, to celebrate as each state was declared.
"The café was packed, and not just with Americans," Maya Siegel, a junior from Brandeis University who studied abroad in Prague last semester, said. "People were very emotional... An Irish guy we met was crying out of joy; you really got to see how much [the election] mattered to the rest of the world."
After Obama won, Siegel said that a group of students celebrated with bottles of champagne on Prague's Charles Bridge and an American-style breakfast at the well-known Czech chain Bohemia Bagel before heading to class.
"[The] next weekend, when I was in Paris, everyone was like, 'Obama!'" Siegel said. "There was definitely a shift in how Americans were viewed abroad."
In Hangzhou, China, students studying with the Tufts-in-China program had a harder time keeping up with election results. Phaedra Brucato, a third-year Tufts/SMFA student, said that the internet was too slow to stream a video, and it was hard to find coverage in English on television.
"It was really amazing to see something so world-changing ... Viewing something like that for Americans is an intense moment," Brucato said. "But it was hard for us and I felt really disconnected [from the election]."
Brucato explained that, in her experience, Chinese people didn't seem aware of the election until after it happened, perhaps because she was studying in a ... less- Westernized city. "Everyone just felt so distant to what was going on; there wasn't the same energy as there would have been [watching it] back home," she said.
