CORVALLIS, OR -- A record number of graduates receive degrees this weekend at Oregon State University. For many, it’s their first in-person graduation. This is OSU's 155th class. The 7,648 graduates earned 7,880 degrees.
OSU typically fills half of Reser Stadium for commencement. This year, they expect a full house. Many students collecting college diplomas this spring only got a virtual ceremonies when they completed high school in 2020.
Carissa O’Donnell is this year’s student body president and helped plan the ceremony, which she says doesn't look like it has in the past. "What drives them to make a lot of these different decisions is just the fact that this one is so special in particular," she says, "Because of the pandemic maybe limiting the amount of graduations for this class in the past." O'Donnell adds, "You always kind of hear about, ‘oh, you graduate! You graduate.’ And then, you really didn’t get to celebrate that in a traditional sense. And so, this is that time."
Most of the members of this class had a muted start to college, meeting classmates and roommates while masked and then navigating virtual learning. "You could see traditional college experiences or hear from your parents or friends what theirs were like. But you couldn’t actually be in that position to know the difference," says O'Donnell, "This graduation signifies a lot in that sense too, because it shows a lot of perseverance as well as adaptation."
She says the end of this year brough an electricity for the class of 2024, "Now that we’ve kind of gone through a pandemic, and at the end of it had the opportunity to soak everything in, I just see it on campus. Everyone is just racing to ‘fill their buckets’ one last time before they take off."
O’Donnell says it was nerve racking to see some colleges cancel commencement this year because of protests over the war in Gaza, "I do think that that caused a bit of stress to the graduating class, because they were like, ‘We didn’t have a graduation for high school. And now our graduation for our undergraduate degrees, or our college, might also be on the line.’"
OSU’s Corvallis commencement is at 10:30 a.m. Saturday. OSU-Cascades in Bend celebrates graduation at 10 a.m. Sunday.
