YES! You did it! We did it! Likely not the ending any of us were imagining, AND I our you all embracing it with resilience and grace.
Graduating is a threshold. It is a time when you leave one reality and identity (student) and new terrain and new opportunities await you. It can be overwhelming, anticlimactic, emotional, numbing, exciting, relieving and perhaps a combination of all of those things. It isn’t the same but one thing I can liken it to is a birthday, when someone asks “how do you feel?” and I really I feel the same. Yet there is a change in identity in aging from 21 to 22 or from 30 to 31 or from 66 to 67. Graduating seniors, you may not actually feel very different when you wake up tomorrow even though today you just GRADUATED! A big deal!
Maybe you will feel drastically different and/or maybe you will feel a slow trickle of change. However you feel, is exactly how you’re supposed to feel! In reflecting with some students I heard folks saying it felt anticlimactic to graduate. Especially now, seniors can’t get up on stage and be seen, acknowledged and celebrated by family and friends in the way their peers of 2019 did. While I’m amazed, impressed, and grateful for all the ways UMass is striving to celebrate undergraduates despite the circumstances, virtual celebrations are not the same. Yet, rituals of any kind can be an important way to mark a threshold crossing. So in tandem with engaging in these virtual events however you may be, I invite and encourage you to do something for YOU. Plant something, eat something, call someone, walk somewhere, have a fire, whatever that looks like for you, I hope that you are taking a pause to celebrate all you have done. Your instructors and advisors in SFF are SO proud of you!
CNS Virtual Celebration can be found here and Stockbridge BS Sustainable Food & Farm celebration can be found here. On those pages you will find videos (including a video from your SFF student ambassador Rhianna Zadravec!) and some really great photos of you! I hope you take some time to look at them and share with your families & friends. There also is a special video I made for your families here.
Adrienne Maree Brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy continue to anchor me in this turbulence. Sometimes I want an answer now, when is this going to end? When can I hug my friends and family again? And at this time, the principles that anchor me the most are: “Change is constant (be like water)” and “What you pay attention to grows.” It feels important to grieve all of the loss due to COVID-19. AND I believe in the transformative power of paying attention to delight and gratitude. I trust the resilience of each of you and know you will continue to do great work in this world. THANK YOU for all your hard work, for learning so passionately and teaching me. I see you and celebrate you as you cross this threshold to become a graduated human being! Best wishes in your next steps. May you & your loved ones be healthy and happy. Please stay in touch!
degree program in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, Sarah Berquist, was chosen as the 2019 recipient of the Massachusetts Distinguished Service Award by Phi Kappa Phi, the nation’s oldest, largest, and most selective all-discipline honor society. According to society President, Professor Theresa Y. Austin, the UMass Chapter recognized Ms. Berquist for her outstanding service to the University in ways that are consistent with the Society’s motto of “Let the love of learning rule.” 
