GRADS GO VIRTUAL
Valedictorian Meghan Boyd watched from Calgary on Wednesday as Algonquin College held its first virtual graduation ceremony — including her pre-recorded address — for 10,000 students.
Meghan Boyd was in Calgary on Wednesday with her parents and boyfriend, watching on YouTube as the valedictorian delivered a speech to her graduating class at Algonquin College.
The experience was a bit surreal, considering Boyd herself was the valedictorian.
Welcome to graduation, pandemic style.
Educational institutions are finding virtual ways to celebrate graduates who can't walk down the aisle in cap and gown to receive their diplomas.
Algonquin held its first virtual graduation ceremonies Wednesday for 10,000 students.
The videotaped ceremonies were designed to resemble the in-person experience — from the opening moments when host Chris Janzen, Algonquin's senior vice-president academic, asked viewers at home to stand for a rendition of O Canada, to the inspirational speeches.
“The door is open for you to really change the world,” Algonquin president Claude Brule said in his videotaped speech, urging graduates to become champions of social justice, transform society and the workplace, to dream big and to be unafraid to make mistakes.
The ceremony for Boyd's school of media and design included a speech by honorary degree recipient David Ross, CEO of Ross Video, an Ottawa-based company with 800 employees that designs, manufactures and delivers services for live video production.
“I'm not going to lie to you,” Ross said. “This is a really tough time to be graduating and entering the workforce.”
The bad times will end, Ross told the graduates, but the things you can learn from them last a lifetime. “Starting out during tough times changes people. It may well change you.”
Ross described how his grandmother was shaped by her experience during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
“And she was tough. She was a single mom with three kids, but still became a school teacher, eventually teaching three generations of students.”
A slide show was also created for the ceremonies, with personalized slides for each graduate.
Boyd was up at 8 a.m. Calgary time with her parents, Jeff and Michele, to watch the ceremony. “It really captured all the convocation traditions,” she said. “I thought it was so good! And obviously it was very cool to have my speech there.”
She was disappointed that she couldn't deliver her address in person, but said Algonquin made the best of a bad situation.
And although she didn't have to deliver the speech in-person, the process of videotaping it was also nerve-racking, Boyd said. Her boyfriend used his cellphone to videotape her while holding up a laptop so she could read the script.
“It took a few takes!”
Her diploma in public relations will arrive in the mail.
Boyd was in her final semester of the two-year program, doing an internship at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, when the pandemic hit and Ontario went into lockdown in March. She finished her internship online, and in July she was hired full-time at the firm.
The Algonquin graduation held extra resonance for Boyd because she had missed the ceremony when she received a bachelor's degree in sociology and psychology from Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. She had been diagnosed with lupus and was too ill to attend.
Boyd, 26, was forced to take a year off before enrolling at Algonquin.
“If I only knew when I was ill, and didn't get to go to my university graduation, if I knew where I would be now, I wouldn't believe it,” she said.
“So anything can happen if you work hard and you believe in yourself. I know that all sounds very cliché, but it's really true.”
She laughed as one of the lessons from her studies at Algonquin kicked in.
“I just remember in class, we were not supposed to write in clichés. So now I'm talking in clichés. I feel like my writing professor would smack me on the hand,” she joked.
But Boyd had a serious message for classmates graduating in the middle of a pandemic. Here it is, straight from her speech:
“Students who are graduating now are thrust into a time of great uncertainty, but it is important to remember that we are well equipped to handle this. We have been given all the right tools; we just have to figure out how to use them.
“If there's anything this period in history has shown us, it's that we are resilient. We are capable of overcoming hardships to accomplish our goals. I'm so very proud to be part of this graduating class and everything we have and will accomplish.
“So congratulations to the class of 2020, we did it!”