This month four years ago looked drastically different for students. There were no school dances, most class lessons moved online and Zoom became the new place to spend time with friends.
Not to mention, in 2020, there were certainly no in-person graduations.
“I graduated in a parking lot,” Sierra Chabola laughed, as she looked back on her high school ceremony.
Now, she is part of San Diego State University’s Class of 2024 graduating with a degree in kinesiology.
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“I just feel excited,” she told NBC 7. “I feel like we accomplished everything, and we came in at such an unprecedented time with COVID and everything.”
The last time she remembers walking across a stage and being handed a diploma was for her eighth grade promotion.
“Nothing that’s like, ‘You did this. This is your hard work paying off.’ Like everybody graduates middle school, most graduate high school, but this is like, 'We did this,” Chabola said.
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Chabola was one of nearly 12,000 degree candidates who were eligible to participate in SDSU’s commencement this weekend. She said she feels like her and her peers who started during the height of the pandemic are not less, but more connected, and that this weekend is extra special for them.
“I feel like we took it in stride, and that’s why all of us are so appreciative and so happy,” she said. ‘We’re all in this together.”
Four years ago, NBC 7 included Hoover High School graduate Michelle Perales Panduro in a story about how high school seniors were being celebrated through social media. Fast-forward to this year, she is graduating from the University of Richmond in Virginia.
“My second year was actually the first time I stepped foot on campus,” she told NBC 7.
Like thousands of others across the country, Perales Panduro learned through virtual classes. However, she wasn’t only doing it because of the pandemic. Two weeks before her flight to school, to learn through a hybrid model, she was diagnosed with a kidney disorder.
“It was really difficult managing everything all at once, and I was close to deferring my first year of college,” she recalled. “It’s bittersweet just because I feel like, I wish I got that year back.”
But, Perales Panduro pushed through with the help of her professors, and medical care team, and now she is on track to earn a Ph.D. someday.
“Tough times never last, but tough people do,” she said.
