After two years of pandemic learning, capped by one final quarter of classes reconvened on campus, more than 670 Western Washington University graduates flipped their tassels and received their diplomas on Dec. 10.
Carver Gymnasium, which holds roughly 2,500 spectators for Western’s sporting events, was brought to full capacity three times on Saturday, holding commencements at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. The university estimates more than 5,300 people attended Saturday’s events, the third in-person commencement since the pandemic.
Also joining Saturday’s commencement were 114 alums, including 11 graduate school alums, who graduated during the height of the pandemic from March 2020 to June 2021, a walking reminder of how much time and effort has gone into these cohorts of college graduates.
Katie Caines, a candidate for Master of Education in Educational Administration, spoke to the hundreds of graduating seniors at the evening commencement ceremony. The single mother of two from Aldergrove, British Columbia, has taught at almost every grade level, including in Canadian federal prisons, and earned her two-year master’s degree entirely online.
During her speech to the crowd at the final commencement ceremony of the day, Caines quoted a famous faux-Latin phrase from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” that she said helped guide her through the thorns of pandemic learning.
“It’s not even real Latin, but it translates to a mantra that I repeat every time I’m faced with a roadblock: don’t let the bastards grind you down,” Caines said during her speech. “No matter what life throws at you, fight through it. See yourself to the other side. Find your light at the end of the tunnel. Find your passion and make your waves.”
As hundreds of students from the College of Environment, Interdisciplinary Studies, Fine and Performing Arts, Education, and Fairhaven College filed out into the cold December night, many dropped small items atop the 2022 time capsule.
A tradition at Western since 1912, each graduating class fills a stone with memories of their time on campus — or more likely, online. The stone is then buried along the “Memory Walk,” a brick pathway along Western’s first building, Old Main, lined with the stones of every graduating class prior.
For this class of graduating seniors, and the few alumni who decided to return for a day, many of the college memories will be from behind a laptop screen.
Cora Denton, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Woodring College of Education, said she was proud to finally reach this milestone, and relieved it wasn’t done online like the majority of her classmates in the Language, Literacy and Cultural Studies program.
“It was really nice to have something in person,” Denton said. “I think today is more important to a lot of my family than it is to me. I’m really glad that they had the opportunity to actually come see me and have it be the big deal that it is.”
