Graduates, friends and families gathered in the hundreds at Fort Lewis College’s Ray Dennison Memorial Field on Saturday to celebrate at the college’s spring 2024 commencement ceremony.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not hold back graduating students, in which many of whom entered college during or before the pandemic in 2020 and faced unusual challenges.
“Strange rules for Cloroxing desks and door knobs,” “freezing or baking in outdoor classrooms” and “early days of COVID testing with those bayonet-like, brain-tickling nasal probes” weren’t enough to deter students from pursuing their degrees, FLC Faculty Senate President Ellen Paul said during the commencement.
Graduate Brett Snowden, who majored in engineering, said he took some time off from college when COVID-19 struck. He was going to a college in Connecticut and decided to move to Colorado. He later enrolled at FLC.
“It was a lot harder to get the information that you needed” during COVID-19, he said.
“I felt like just over the Zoom classes that I got a little bit less access to the professors. … Being in the classroom is really important,” he said.
Snowden said he hopes to be hired for a job in Durango and is looking for an opportunity to pursue construction developments abroad.
Graduate Jessica Smith of Coyote Canyon, New Mexico, located in McKinley County, said she didn’t feel like she’d just graduated. She finished her fifth year and was done with college.
She studied environmental science with an initial focus on water management and developed her interests from there.
She said she will work with the Mountain Studies Institute in the summer.
“It’s all related to water too, so I’m pretty happy about it,” she said.
FLC President Tom Stritikus, who gave his last graduation speech on Saturday, said the students “are hell-bent on making the world and their communities a better place.”
He announced in March he’d be stepping down to take a job at Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles.
“Our faculty and our staff take incredible pride in building the knowledge base and the skills that enable our students to make a difference in the world,” he said at the ceremony.
Graduate Ellie Simpson, who transferred to FLC from the Truckee, California, area about two years ago, earned her psychology degree on Saturday.
“I want to work with children and families,” she said. “I wanted to do the medical side of things originally, and that just didn’t work out for me.”
She still wanted to help people somehow, and she’s always been curious about why people do the things they do. She said she wants to find solutions.
Simpson said she had graduated high school during the COVID-19 pandemic, but pursuing her associate degree was difficult.
“Getting my associate degree was difficult during COVID doing a drive-thru graduation,” she said. “Having a legit graduation now (for) my bachelor’s degree has been really cool.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
