BRATTLEBORO — For the first time in more than two years, graduates crossed the stage in person at School for International Training on Aug. 21, during SIT Graduate Institute's 55th commencement ceremony.
The event marked a milestone for students who had completed their master's degrees - some remotely from their homes and others at SIT centers around the world - during a global pandemic.
Thirty-seven students from the class of 2021 were awarded diplomas during an event that blended in-person and online participation. Two others received graduate-level certificates.
Two students from the class of 2020 also participated in person. SIT's last in-person commencement on the Brattleboro campus was in May 2019; a virtual commencement was held in August 2020.
“Your journey here today was not an easy one - you had real issues and hurdles to overcome,” said keynote speaker Aisha Naomi Cooper, a Liberian American refugee, SIT alumna, and World Learning board member who works at the World Bank. “Those moments made you stronger. It is that resilient spirit, courage, and strong sense of determination that make up your story and build the new generation of leaders that is within each of you.”
Despite the pandemic, SIT Graduate Institute has continued to offer master's degree programs online and in person at SIT centers around the world.
Student speaker Danielle Purvis, who earned her M.A. in climate change and global sustainability, said her cohort had experienced “a lockdown, then an evacuation, and then a lockdown and an evacuation.”
After calling for a moment of silence for all those lost to COVID-19, Cooper recounted how her own experience living through a civil war in Liberia has led her to support efforts to improve the lives of marginalized people, especially women and girls, around the world.
“In spite of all that you had to endure,” she told the graduates, “I hope you still consider it a privilege to earn your degrees today because there are many students around the world, especially girls, who have been robbed of their full potential due to the lack of access to education, the traps of poverty they find themselves in, and the threat of the pandemic. Their stories also matter.”
In an address written from his home in Morocco and read by SIT President Dr. Sophia Howlett, Dr. Said Graiouid, SIT dean of faculty, said, “You will be remembered as the class that did it all. You have weathered the storm and survived graduate school during one of the most difficult sanitary crises in modern history.”
Howlett reminded the graduates of the global issues ahead such as climate change and refugee resettlement.
“Changing the world is complicated; it's messy and it's difficult, and a lot of times things go wrong,” she said. “Go with the knowledge that you will touch lives and places; you have touched them already and they have touched you. Always be open to the changes others can have on your lives and remember that we live to connect with others and our environment.”
Through her climate change studies, Purvis said, she developed “a global lens of how we are inextricably connected to each other and to our natural environment. And I know, more than ever before, that the ways of this world are unsustainable and must change, and that we get to be on the front lines of building new bridges and creating a new way of life.”