Students shine at December graduation

December 10, 2020

By Genevieve Buthod

The School of Communication gathered virtually Dec. 9 to celebrate the graduation of 30 students for the mid-term commencement.

SOC staff and faculty, some of whom donned their regalia, attended and cheered for the students, while friends and family from different cities and time zones joined through Zoom.

After a welcome from Dean Hong Cheng, Faculty Staff Chaplain Chris Murphy led the students in prayer, “in the hope that their intellect, talent, and leadership will be used to improve this world.” He reminded students that graduation is a time of ending, but that it is also a time of beginning.

The first student speaker, Alexis Douge, inspired the audience by boldly rejecting the idea that success is in any way related to material wealth, and instead saying that, “success is about intellectual wealth, and how you use it to make the world a better place.” She went on to quote James Baldwin, whose words, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” helped to drive home her point that, “it is our responsibility to be active in that change.”

The second student speaker, Luke Scaletta, made sure his fellow students knew, “Our experience at Loyola is not defined by this pandemic...It doesn’t feel like a great time to leave the world of school, but the world desperately needs your talents.”

The guest speaker for this year’s fall commencement was Holly Harnisch, Director of Brand Marketing at The New York Times and a Loyola SOC alumna (’09). She told students that when they face a daunting challenge, “when your gut says, ‘This is going to be really hard’—that’s your gut saying, ‘Let’s do this.’ And when that happens, you’re going to need your support system. And I believe I am looking at them virtually right now.”

And to conclude the ceremony, Assistant Dean Lauren Sanchez read the names of the graduates.

The graduates and their degrees are as follows:

Carina Jo Anderson	FDMD-BASOC
Tyler Kenneth Bodda	FDMD-BASOC
Carla Leonor Buenrostro	CMUN-BASOC
Kelly Annabelle Cooke	ADPR-BASOC
Mariko C Dennis	CMUN-BASOC
Tess Catherine Donelon	CMUN-BASOC
Alexis E Douge	ADPR-BASOC
Mary K Ellis	CMUN-BASOC
Ariel Barbara Fusz	CMUN-BASOC
Diana Guliyeva	ADPR-BASOC
Kendall Ann Herbert	ADPR-BASOC
Baher M. Hussein	MJRN-BASOC
Jessica Alexandra Kelley	CMUN-BASOC
Elizabeth Louise Kidd	CMUN-BASOC
Anne King	CMUN-BASOC
Stella Marie Krueger	ADPR-BASOC
Declan Christopher Lyons	CMUN-BASOC
Marguerite Rose Michaud	MJRN-BASOC
Brooke Hannah Moore	ADPR-BASOC
Emily L Morris	CMUN-BASOC
Finisha O'Quinn	DMST-MC
Dhruvi Rashminbhai Patel	ADPR-BASOC
Brian Nicholas Powers	FDMD-BASOC
Paul Lawrence Quinn	DMST-MC
Gabriela Rojas	ADPR-BASOC
Jenna Catherine Ross	ADPR-BASOC
Luke Manning Scaletta	ADPR-BASOC
Emma Therese Stokes	MJRN-BASOC
Allison Grace Tallman	CMUN-BASOC
Alexis Elizabeth Tiller	GSCM-MS
Amy Tran	ADPR-BASOC
Vishal Varma	ADPR-BASOC
Andrew J. Weigel	ADPR-BASOC
Emma Patricia Whaley	ADPR-BASOC
Yong S. Won	MJRN-BASOC
Ashley Wright	MJRN-BASOC
Martina Alice Steel Zornig	ADPR-BASOC

If you missed the event, but would like access to the recording of the day, please contact SOC Events Coordinator Genevieve Buthod at gbuthod@luc.edu.