MORGANTOWN — If the WVU students receiving advanced degrees at the WVU Coliseum on Sunday had been required to select their own personal theme songs for the soundtrack, Andrea Cheuvront’s would have been easy.
She could have gone with “This Little Light of Mine.”
The beloved ditty for kids is also a spiritual that morphed itself into an anthem during America’s civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Cheuvront was among the 378 masters and doctoral candidates who walked at the WVU Coliseum during the post-grad school commencement of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
Ceremonies were held at noon in the basketball arena.
Cheuvront, on one level, let her light shine in the form of her mortarboard.
She ambitiously did it out with a hidden battery pack and a series of lights that glowed — even in a teeming Class of 2019 sea.
“Different, huh?” she grinned.
Her real light, though, is within.
A Parkersburg native who took a master’s degree in social work, she wants to stay home to knock the shadows of opioid abuse here.
In 2016, one West Virginian was dying of an overdose every 10 hours.
“This degree is going to give me a lot more opportunities for research,” she said. “We’re hurting.”
For her, social work isn’t a degree — it’s a calling.
And that’s exactly what Judith Gold Stitzel was talking about in her commencement address.
Stitzel spent 30 years as an English professor at WVU.
She also founded the school’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, which is now known for its international research.
The English department is housed in the Eberly College, and Stitzel celebrated the diversity of the school that conferred 304 master’s degrees and 74 doctorates Sunday.
She quoted from Buddhist tomes and the Book of Ecclesiastes, and even gave a nod to the Hokey Pokey.
The time-honored children’s song and dance is a good metaphor for social outreach, she said.
“Eventually, you’re going to put your whole self in and shake it all about,” she said.
“That’s what it’s all about.”
Cheuvront’s little light was still shining bright as she reached for her diploma.
TWITTER @DominionPostWV
