Wake Forest University President Susan Wente called it “the before and after.”
The 1,000 or more undergraduates in black gowns and caps knew exactly what she meant.
In the fall of 2019, they arrived on campus, ready for the full college experience. Some eight months later, that all came to halt when COVID became a global pandemic, upending their college experience.
“You were tested,” Wente told the new graduates at Monday’s graduation ceremony. “You navigated a once-in-a-lifetime global crisis.”
Though daily college life returned to normal by the time of their junior years, COVID had a lingering impact, said Rabab Meghani, a native of Dothan, Ala., who graduated with a philosophy degree.
“It doesn’t feel real still that I am holding my diploma. In some ways, it feels like we are weirdly frozen in the second semester of our freshman year,” she said.
Her favorite memory came in the carefree days before COVID sent she and her classmates back home for the remainder of the semester and made mask-wearing and testing as much of the Wake experience as homecoming and Hit the Bricks.
“It was beating Duke, February 2020. It was a Tuesday, and everyone went out afterward. It was complete mania,” Meghani recalled, smiling. “We were out rolling the quad, and nobody could get us under control, and nobody wanted to. It was beautiful.”
Meghani is taking a gap year then plans to enroll in medical school. For her gap year, she’d like to go to a one-year master’s program and continue her study of philosophy.
“I want to play with philosophy while I can,” she said.
Meghani was one of 1,185 undergraduates earning degrees on a graduation day that started overcast before the clouds parted, washing Hearn Plaza in warm light.
Henian Newsome was among the 898 students earning graduate degrees. It was a rare appearance on the Wake campus for Newsome, 39.
He started Wake’s Master of Business Administration in Charlotte in 2017, but a year into the program, he learned he had stage 2 colon cancer, sidetracking him for a few years.
Newsome moved to New York City then jumped back into the program when it moved online. Now living in Nashville and cancer-free, Newsome enjoyed Monday’s graduation with his mother, mother-in-law, sister and nephew.
“This is one of those things I had to complete,” said Newsome, a member of the armed forces who will be moving to Washington, D.C., to work for the Pentagon. “I wanted to make sure I was here to commemorate that journey.”
Commencement speaker Killian Noe, a 1980 graduate of Wake Forest, has spent her life providing “radical hospitality” to people living in the margins — the homeless, the addicted, those struggling with mental health issues.
“You understand that what gives purpose and meaning to life is not what we get, but what we give. But today, you enter more fully into a dominant culture hellbent on convincing you that life is about acquiring more and more of what will never satisfy your deepest longings,” she said.
Noe asked them to use their powers to influence others.
“Graduates, you may become a lawyer, a teacher, a software engineer, a pastry chef, a parent, or a phlebotomist,” she said. “Whatever ways you give your life, use your unique power to influence on behalf of some individual or group being left out until their suffering becomes your suffering, until their joy becomes your joy. Then under their leadership, inspired by their courage, enlist in the struggle to transform systems that perpetuate exclusion. For we deny the oneness in the human family at our own peril.”
Symone Davis of Charlotte plans to work with such people. She received a Master of Science in Addiction Research and Clinical Health and is applying to medical school.
On Monday, she posed for several pictures with her parents, Larry and Redonda Davis.
“We’re proud parents,” Redonda Davis said.
Symone is the last of their six children to graduate from college.
“Seeing your kids progress,” Larry Davis said, “it touches my heart.”