Do you know what’s special about the college Class of 2024?
Four years ago, many of them were the high school Class of 2020: The first graduating teens to have their senior year derailed by COVID-19. Months away from leaving childhood behind and entering that strange new world of semi-adulthood, their whole lives were turned upside down.
Classes were canceled, then eventually moved online, so no more morning hangouts at the lockers, catching up with friends at lunch, rehearsing for the play, or practicing for the game. Prom got nixed — or delayed until summer or moved outside — for fear of it being a super-spreader event. Graduation happened over Zoom in the living room or spread out across the football field. Senior trips got canceled or pushed back because of travel restrictions. Masks were added to fancy dresses and suits and caps and gowns.
Then the high school Class of 2020 became the college Class of 2024, and instead of entering dorms and getting to know roommates and going to freshman orientation, they lived at home, with the same people they’d been living with, and took classes online and otherwise alone. And when they finally — finally! — made it to campus, there were masks and COVID tests and quarantine protocols, and all the best parts of the social experience were still banned or severely limited.
The Class of 2024 made it through all that, and here they are today, getting to celebrate their successes with the ceremonies and accoutrements generations before and after have taken and will take for granted. After being denied their senior year milestones in 2020, now they get to have all the pomp and circumstance as they walk across the stage this weekend to shake hands and accept their diplomas to the applause and cheers of loved ones and strangers alike. And they deserve it. (Our hearts still break for the college Class of 2020, who never really had a chance to make up what they lost that year.)
In honor of the class that had its college experience defined by a pandemic, we’d like to share some sentiments that we first shared with the Class of 2021:
In case you haven’t heard it from someone yet, we’re proud of you. You not only made it through college — you did it during a pandemic! (You should put that on your resumé.) We’re proud of you if you got straight As or straight Cs (“Cs get degrees” after all) or anything in between. So you should be proud of yourself, too.
As graduation approaches (and long after it has passed), people will offer you all sorts of unsolicited advice. Some of it will work for you; some of it won’t. But here are some words of wisdom we think apply to all of you equally.
Have faith in your own strength. You survived college during a pandemic, and that took more strength than you probably knew you had. So have faith in your ability to get through the tough times and the disappointing ones, in your ability to work through or around the challenges, in your ability to keep going even when you’re not sure you can. COVID may have defined your college years, but it will not define your future.
Congratulations Class of 2024!
