After spending nearly all his life in school, Caleb Schrock-Hurst saw Sunday as a transition.
“It definitely feels like the end of an era,” the Harrisonburg native said before Eastern Mennonite University’s commencement. “It’s definitely a lot of changes. It’s definitely exciting and I think EMU has prepared us to find a way to participate in society.”
Schrock-Hurst joined 540 graduate and undergraduate students who received degrees during the school’s 100th commencement on Sunday.
As part of the centennial celebration, EMU awarded its first honorary doctorate to commencement speaker Leymah Gbowee.
Gbowee is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who shared the 2011 award with two other women for their role in mobilizing women to help stop the Liberian civil war.
Gbowee, who received a master’s in conflict transformation from the school in 2007, focused on political strife throughout the world. She urged the graduates to stand up for justice.
“It doesn’t take long to walk up to someone and give them hope,” she said. “When issues are no longer trending and the hashtags are no longer hashing and the lights and camera are off — defend peace, defend justice and you can never go wrong.”
Graduate Alexa Weeks couldn’t put the flood of emotions running through her head into words, feeling “scattered” before receiving a degree in elementary education.
“It doesn’t feel like I’m supposed to be graduating,” said the Westmoreland County native. “I’m just kind of like I don’t know what to do. There’s just so many emotions.”
For biology major Kat Lehman, the day was “a little bittersweet” as she thought of her friends from the past four years.
“It’s a little exciting,” said Lehman of Dover, Ohio. “But it’s definitely just starting to feel real that everybody’s sort of headed off to new things at this point and it might be a long time before I see some of these folks who I’ve spent four years with.”
“Today we trade it all in for a piece of paper,” Bailey said. “But it’s more than just a fancy piece of paper with our name in calligraphy. … It’s a receipt of our experience here.”
Although many graduates wanted to reflect on the past four years, that doesn’t mean they aren’t looking forward.
Lehman plans to attend medical school at Ohio State University while Schrock-Hurst will spend a year as an editor in a publishing house in Vietnam. Weeks will stay local as she takes a job as a third-grade teacher at Smithland Elementary School.
“We did it,” said Keyri Lopez-Godoy, who received a degree in elementary education. “We are on our way.”
This article is republished from the May 7, 2018, Daily News-Record.