artwork by Leah Morris
story by Robin Hauck

In case you are unsure, it’s mid-May, the time of year when the Internet usually teems with commencement speeches and praise for the pearls of wisdom they deliver. In their place this spring, some publications invited would-be speakers to offer written advice. The Wall Street Journal, for example, asked the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Amy Chua to contribute to their To The Class of 2020 special section.  It’s not the same of course, nothing is the same.

And let’s face it, there’s only one influencer on everyone’s mind right now. So imagine - what if the COVID-19 virus stepped up the podium to deliver a commencement address. What would it say?

Would it start all heavy-handed and warn students that everything can be taken away in a flash - so be grateful for your health and privilege?

Would it take a more spiritual approach, reflecting on the interconnectedness of all living things, the shared experience of all people, regardless of geography, economics, race?

Would it gloat, saying humans have created a safe haven for viruses, blaming climate change, pollution, deforestation, corporate greed?

Or would it say, I’m here to remind you how strong you are, as a human race. You have the power to conquer this plague, you know how to take care of each other. You know how to adapt and heal. You know how to band together and shield. You will survive this, you will overcome. 

We’ll never have to find out, thankfully. But I’ve heard all of those sentiments voiced by various sources over the last couple months, and I have to admit they sound pretty convincing.

For me, the question of what the pandemic will mean to the class of 2020 is personal. My oldest daughter Haley graduates from Georgetown this month and, like her, I had big dreams about how we’d celebrate her achievement. I’d been hearing about the thrills of Georgetown Commencement for the last four years: river cruise, drinks at The Tombs, Senior Ball at Union Station, cocktail parties, graduation ceremonies, commencement speeches. We’d spend the week in D.C. with our family and the families of her six roommates. We’d reflect on their achievements and experiences. On Georgetown’s historic grounds, in the company of her accomplished classmates, we’d have all the necessary elements to shower her with a commensurate amount of pride and love. 

I’ve noticed my tendency to latch on to generalizations made about the class of 2020 in my attempt to get a handle on what this loss means to Haley and her class. I’ve seen her cry and grieve, I’ve heard her express gratitude and compassion, I’ve watched her struggle to answer the straightforward question: how do you want to celebrate your graduation? She’s sad, but she’s also incredibly brave, pragmatic and adaptable in the face of the loss of her senior spring.

It got me thinking: are the lessons and takeaways that adults assume the virus is teaching students the same as the lessons and takeaways the students are actually experiencing for themselves? Are we making assumptions to help us get through this, when really we ought to be allowing students to guide us through these learnings, in their time, in their way?

After all, it would not be the first time adults want to assign significance to their children’s experience, or to the experience of a younger generation, based on what they have learned from their own traumas. Maybe the lessons the COVID-19 virus speaks from the podium to graduates sounds very different than I imagined.

So I set out to ask seniors from colleges across the country what they are learning and feeling and thinking as they navigate these uncharted waters.

How big a deal is this, really?

Really big. Last year approximately 3.9 million students graduated college in the US. That’s 3.9 million kids who this year will not have a senior spring, an in-person commencement ceremony, a chance to say goodbye to faculty and friends, a collective recognition of their accomplishment, closure.

And the real world they’re entering, while intimidating in the best of times, now poses colossal challenges. With unemployment hitting 14.7%, and analysts worrying those numbers fall short of the whole truth, the “real world” is suddenly as unreal as it’s ever been; not only for this generation but for those who will hire, mentor and support them.

The good news is, this class has a built-in vaccine. What I heard from students I spoke with is that this class believes in the power of the after and knows optimism will destroy even the deadliest and most insidious adversary. Yes, it sucks, they agree, but it’s our responsibility to keep moving forward, doing what we can to help and somehow, make the most of it.

Every graduate experiences this in their own way; feelings ebb and flow from hour to hour and day to day. It’s silly to make comprehensive assumptions about learnings and takeaways while still in the middle of the crisis. However, the insights I gathered from the students I spoke with came from their collective confidence. And they made me feel confident about the ability of this generation to not only get through this, but get through stronger, smarter and ready to lead.

Creativity is Key

Everyone needs music now, more than ever. Tehillah Alphonso, a Pop Music Performance (Voice) major at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California isn’t letting COVID-19 silence her powerful voice. After spending her “first three years in fear,” of not making it in the music industry, things started to take off during her first semester senior year. Hustle and hard work paid off and suddenly she was juggling school, two part time jobs and regular session work.

She performed with Billie Eilish at the Grammys. She sang background vocals on a Christmas album, performed on a film score and became a background singer for the up and coming pop star, Niki. In fact she was supposed to travel with Niki to Indonesia and perform at Coachella this year. Then came COVID and Tehilla, originally from Omaha, NB moved to the Whiteman AirForce Base in Missouri to quarantine with her mother.

But she never wallowed. She did what she does best: made more music. With so many friends who are musicians, Tehilla stays in touch through social media. “People have been writing more, collaborating more,” she says. She started a quarantine cover band with a friend. “It makes us laugh and makes us happy and that’s’ what we need in these uncertain times.”

She also took part in USC’s Live from Somewhere Series, online performances by Thornton School students to celebrate their final semester. Tehilla like many of her classmates, is finding ways to share joy through her music - isolated yet bonded through the need to create.

Kaleigh O’Connor is one of Haley’s roommates at Georgetown. A couple weeks into quarantine, Kaleigh realized she had dissolved into feeling sorry for herself. Losing senior spring felt like losing a relationship. She knew she was grieving, but she constantly judged herself for it. It hit her gradually, and late and then she panicked, seeing no end in sight.

To pull herself out of it, she talked with her 90 year old Aunt, Dorothy. Dorothy and Kaleigh have a special relationship, they can process things together. When Kaleigh asked Dorothy how the pandemic compared to other catastrophic world events she had lived through, Dorothy didn’t hesitate. She said, “this is the craziest by far.” Rather than drown in her feelings, Kaleigh wrote about them. She penned an Op-Ed which she sent (unanswered) to the Boston Globe. Honest and heart wrenching, Kaleigh’s piece gives voice to so many in her generation grappling to come to terms with what they’ve lost, while simultaneously understanding their complaints evaporate in comparison to those suffering in hospitals, food deserts, homeless shelters, and unemployment lines.

We’ve posted it here, have your tissues handy.

Recognize the Inequalities in the World and Fight Them

Rachel Marandett majored in Religious Studies at Pomona College in CA. I spoke with her on the day she (virtually) presented her thesis and was preparing to head home to the east coast after spending the last seven weeks in California. Rachel’s main areas of academic interest are Judaism and Islam, with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After four years of intense research and high-profile internships, she believes the region and practices can teach us a lot about how the world operates and why.

Righting wrongs and combating injustice drives Rachel socially as well as academically. When administrators at Pomona debated what kind of grading policy to put in place for the spring semester, Rachel put her weight behind the most equitable policy. “Facebook blew up,” she says of the amount of student engagement with the decision. Universal Pass - her policy of choice, happily won out.

Rachel plans to go to law school and study international human rights law in order to dedicate her career to social justice. She cites the lack of access to supplies and tests in East Jerusalem as an example of where human rights law could make a difference in the lives of people living in occupied or geopolitically disadvantaged parts of the world. The virus she says has only exacerbates the injustices that already exist.

Carlie Beard, a Journalism major at Hampton University in Virginia planned to find a job after graduation, gain experience in the fashion industry and pay off her student loans. A Hampton Presidential Fellow, she applied to jobs all across the country, from her home state of Ohio to New York to California. Some weeks she applied to as many as ten jobs. 

“And then COVID happened,” she says. Applications went unanswered, positions were eliminated, some she didn’t get. 

Carlie looked at the job market and at the state of the economy and pivoted. She applied to graduate schools and now anticipates a new path in the year ahead. “I took this crazy situation and looked at what I could do. I made the most of it. People are dying left and right, I’m so grateful.”

Carlie founded a non-profit called Carlie Cares in 2010, inspired by a need she noticed when volunteering for her church. Carlie Cares creates hygeiene kits and donates them to the homeless and others in need. She and her team have set a goal of donating to a shelter a month during the pandemic. Working with Carlie Cares gives her life purpose through the uncertainty. To stay focused she says she asks herself, “what would make future Carlie proud?”

Adapt? Pivot? No problem

These kids know enough not to hold on too tight. They have proven they can adapt, and as Scott Galloway told Kara Swisher on their podcast Pivot, the ability to adapt is what keeps humans on the top of the food chain. Almost all the graduates I spoke with acknowledge they have had to redesign their post-graduation plan. 

Tom Bresnahan hoped to graduate from the University of Maine and find a job in Finance. A Finance major with a concentration in Management Information Systems, he thought he had positioned himself well for the digital economy, until the pandemic hit. When he realized jobs for college grads would be hard to find he decided to apply to Business School.

Now he has a new plan - attend Bentley in the fall and realize a dream he thought he would have to pursue later in life. 

My cousin’s daughter Maggie Schneider is a senior at Alma College in Alma, MI. Maggie planned to spend the spring studying dance in Brazil with her Brazilian professor and nine other students. Homeschooled through her senior year in high school, Maggie won a scholarship for dance and danced on the Alma College Dance team. Brazil would have been the first place she traveled outside the country, an experience she knew would have impacted her worldview and possibly her future.

Now, homebound in Ohio, she’s finishing up classes online instead, on track to get her diploma in three years instead of four. “We’re lost that sense of closure,” she says. “It’s like we were just flung out into the real world.”

She’s taking her dance classes online. She’ll keep applying for jobs in a hospital even though her applications are going unanswered. She’ll take a gap year before applying to graduate school for occupational therapy. She adjusted her plans with pragmatic grace, what other choice did she have?

Sad, but Guilty about it

Like Maggie, Belle Copponi dreams of becoming an Occupational Therapist. Belle plays field hockey for Springfield College which means she spent most of college “in season.” Though she appreciates how lucky she was to have played her final fall season (five of her lacrosse player roommates weren't so lucky), she looked forward to a spring without the rigorous combination of her Health Sciences course load, F.H. workouts and in-season social constraints. Instead, she’s back at home in Massachusetts doing what she can to help out at home.

Every member of Belle’s immediate family works in a frontline industry which requires them to go to work every day. Seeing firsthand the massive toll the virus is taking on health care workers, ill patients and their families, Belle says she’s very grateful for her youth and good health. But still she says it’s hard when everyone tells her it could be worse. “We’re not allowed to complain.”

She gives voice to a conflict I heard expressed by many students: they want to be honest about the deep sadness they feel for their loss, but in the face of much greater loss across the planet - of life, of livelihood, of health, of workplace safety, of normalcy - they feel extremely guilty for that honesty.

The class of 2020 sits right on the edge between millennials and Generation X. Many of this class feel the weight of negative assumptions made about millennials. Don’t confuse the current situation with failure to launch Belle warns. “We all wanted to graduate and become our own adults and now we’re back with our parents. It’s not what we wanted.”

Will Herman, who will graduate with a degree in Economics from Bowdoin College in Maine has found that being home has been hard for a lot of his friends and they share a sense of disbelief that college is really over. After being home in Massachusetts for a month, he returned to Bowdoin to pick up some things from his off-campus house. That’s when the sadness hit him. He mourned a sense of closure, experiencing all the events they had looked forward to - from Maine Day to Graduation, saying goodbye to friends beyond his main friend group who he worried he might not see again. “There was this sense of hopelessness. A deep down sadness.” 

Still, he is grateful for the tools technology gives his generation to stay in touch and he makes sure to recognize how lucky he is compared to many.

“Yeah, this sucks,” he says. “But families are dealing with so much more. I have learned to appreciate how lucky I am. But still, we are allowed to be upset for what we lost.”

(Traditional) News Sucks, but Technology will Save the Day

Grace Kenney who will graduate from Trinity College with a degree in Art History on May 17, had to shut off her news notifications. “I was getting notifications every day about how screwed the class of 2020 is,” she said. Like most of the students I spoke with, Grace has to avoid traditional news or risk falling into despair.

Haley and Grace both mentioned that they specifically avoid watching daily briefings. Their reactions reminded me of Anna Wintour’s as expressed in her Dreams of Re-Emergence post: “The nightmarish briefings from the White House are making this period we’re living through so much worse.”

Still, Grace insists her generation has a lot of practice handling tough news, that when Trump was elected many kids saw “the cracks in authority and government.”

“We had to accept the crazy and the brash. We became immune to the craziness.”

Social media, FaceTime, Zoom and good old fashioned phone calls not only keep her closely connected with friends, but allow her to curate and filter the information she receives about the pandemic. This generation has their own savvy for distinguishing between technology categories: social media as communication tool, social media for news, social media for entertainment, as well as annoying social media they may want to avoid. And then there’s technology as a broader term which many see as holding society together. Grace sees technology enabling connection, community and allowing businesses to run. Tik Toks aren’t saving people’s lives, she says, but they are entertaining people and making people laugh, keeping people’s spirits up.

Grace notices a difference between a negativity she hears from older generations and an optimism from her own. She believes that a distrust in technology may be contributing to a bleaker outlook amongst older generations, whereas a faith in technology, held by students who have never known a world without cell phones, social media, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, makes for an optimism they can share.

Austin Smith will graduate from the University of Maine with a double major in Communications and Media Studies. In order to focus on his bold academic goals, Austin stayed in Orono at his off campus apartment rather than go home to quarantine. He has two capstone projects to complete and knew his senior spring would be academically focused even before the virus shut down college social life.

Austin studies the way recent technology provides a vocabulary for coping with traumatic events, much in the way mythology provided a vocabulary for early generations to understand natural phenomenon. He sees memes for example, providing a humorous lens through which to view catastrophic realities like the devastation to the economy. Memes help his generation bond over their shared experiences like the loss of jobs.

Memes he believes, can be more influential and even more informative than traditional news outlets and they create a glue over which he and his peers can bond. “Every generation feels as though they are part of something bigger, often times those emotions are not communicated with their fellow peers. Yet for us, our observations of change and perceptions of our environment is communicated on a mass scale while using memes as the medium.”

The Future is in Good Hands With This Class

In 2016, Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed the graduating class of Ohio State University. He cautioned them to “expect the unexpected,” recalling that in 1968 when he started his job in infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, the US Surgeon General was calling the war on infectious disease all but won. He could not have expected AIDS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and now COVID-19, but in his job, he has battled them all. 

Though experts agree there were warning signs and movies like Contagion remind us of how public those warnings were, COVID-19 is the unexpected Fauci warned of. 

Adults, especially qualified adults like Fauci, Bill Gates and Amy Chua, certainly have lessons to share with this class. And the smart kids will listen closely to those lessons. But as I hope the above insights illustrate, adults can learn a lot from listening to the class of 2020 too.

Haley has helped me feel better for losing the chance to watch my first daughter graduate from college, especially by saying that this experience has made her appreciate her family more, (she meant it, I swear). She told me, “The world is so much bigger than us. This virus does not discriminate - it affects everyone. The interconnectedness, the whole world is in it together. It’s so important to be happy in the moment and be grateful for the good things we have.”

Eckhart Tolle wrote, “If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”

The class of 2020 will surely be the subject of extensive historical reflection, much of it along the lines of the words from the podium I attributed to the virus. But from what I’ve heard from these impressive students, history will recall a class alive, alert and creative - ready to lead the country once we get through to the other side.