MORGANTOWN — Sometimes, you just have to go — even when you’re readying to go forth.
Especially when you’re readying to go forth.
“All that coffee,” the soon-to-be WVU graduate said, as she emerged from the restroom. “What’d I miss?”
“Not a whole lot,” her classmate deadpanned. “Did you notice we’re still standing in the same place?”
It was hard not to have graduate-gridlock Sunday afternoon at the WVU Coliseum.
The university capped its 2019 Commencement weekend by sending out seniors from the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
The Eberly event is the traditional closer to graduation weekend, as it is WVU’s largest, most diverse college.
That meant it took a while to get everyone lined up so they walk across the big stage.
More than 1,000 graduates were set to turn their tassels, as Eberly dean R. Gregory Dunaway gleefully informed the Coliseum crowd.
“Settle in,” he said, as appreciative chuckles rippled the basketball arena.
Call it a Mountaineer Melting Pot: Degrees were conferred in anthropology and English. And industrial math and statistics.
And physics, philosophy and Slavic and East European Studies — just to name a few.
Some grads, like Amanda Meier, want to go after the bad guys. She’s a chemistry and forensic science major from Evansburg, Pa., who plans on working in a police crime lab.
“You find out here pretty quick that’s it’s not like the crime shows on TV,” she said. “If this is what you really want to do, WVU is definitely the place to go.”
Brady Smearman, meanwhile, will help his students go after the grammatical good of a well-turned sentence and essay.
He hails from Chester, Hancock County — “Home of the ‘World’s Largest Teapot,’ ” he said, as a point of pride — who will use his newly-minted English diploma to teach that subject in school.
He’s not sure yet if that will be in HIS home state.
“Either here or wherever the four winds take me,” he said. “Of course, I had professors who would definitely knock off points for that ‘four winds’ cliché.”
Whether the Eberly graduates are Mountain State natives, or whether they came to Morgantown for school doesn’t matter, Commencement speaker Pat Getty said.
Getty recently retired as president of Pittsburgh-based Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, which supports education and workforce programs across West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania.
He told the graduates they are now of West Virginia — and not just as graduates of its flagship university.
“What was once timber, then coal, is now you,” he said.
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