Senior Stories: On Graduating During a Pandemic

The Santa Clara is offering graduating seniors a platform to process how they feel about wrapping up their final year at SCU away from each other.

Senior Stories: On Graduating During a Pandemic
Photo by James Tensuan

When Mikayla Poon ’21, social media editor of The Santa Clara, learned that 2020 commencement was being postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, she started thinking of ways to help graduating seniors process heavy disappointment.

“It’s a weird time to graduate. All these seniors just left. We can’t come back to campus, people still have stuff in their dorms,” she says from her relatives’ house in Boston where she’s quarantining so as to protect her grandmother back home in Hawaii. Realizing she had a built-in platform with the student newspaper’s Twitter feed, Poon—who’s on track to graduate two quarters early this December with a degree in Communication—put out a call for seniors to send in their stories.

“I just wanted seniors to share what they were feeling because I think a lot of people are upset or have complicated feelings they want to process but don’t have a ready outlet to do so,” she says. “It’s not graduation, but it’s something.”

The Santa Clara is offering students who are graduating in these strange, unprecedented times a space to share their stories. Tell them how you’re feeling—angry, sad, anxious, calm, surprisingly glad—to be wrapping up your senior year at SCU away from campus, without the trimmings and touchstones that so often shade the final chapter of a school experience.

Help The Santa Clara by sharing your words, photos, videos, and words of wisdom—either through this form or by tagging your stories with #SCUSeniors (#SCUGrad and #SCU2020 work, too)—and they will share them on social media and we will collect some right here.

We are so sorry it’s not a graduation ceremony. But we still want to applaud all you’ve accomplished, who you’ve become, and all that you’ll achieve in the future. Now that’s something to celebrate.

 

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