SPRING 2021 EOP&S GRADUATION
Spring 2021 EOP&S Graduation
EOPS will be celebrating our spring graduates on Friday, May 21, 2021 from 1pm - 2pm. We invite our graduates and their loved ones to join our virtual celebration! Zoom invitations will be sent to students' LACCD email addresses.
A message to the LAPC EOPS Class of 2021, from Dr. Elizabeth Strother, Assistant Director and soon-to-be retired Counselor:
This is to all the LAPC EOPS students who are graduating this year.
I am so proud of this graduating class. This is the largest group of EOPS graduates in the 20 years that I have worked for the program. And you are a wildly successful one, too! We are thrilled for you and honored to be part of your academic journey.
But I am also kind of sad, because for the second time since the pandemic started, we don’t get to have a “real” graduation ceremony. We always look forward to the graduation ceremony, and EOPS is always a very noticeable presence there because we bring bells and whistles (real ones!) and yell—loudly—for our students. And EOPS students are always recognizable with our unique sashes and red “bling” tassels. In fact, I have a collection of bling tassels for every year going back to 2003. They’re our trademark!
If we were having an in-person graduation, this is what we would be yelling: “You’re rock stars!” “You did it!” “We are so proud of you!” “UCLA/CSUN/UCI/CSULA [fill in the blank] is lucky to have you!” And we would be hugging you and high-fiving you and just having a blast. I would be trying to video you walking in with my not-very-good photography skills, just trying to capture the moment as I’ve done every year for the past 20 years.
So try to picture this while at your virtual graduation. We will be watching from home, and we’ll be hugging you, and high-fiving and yelling congratulations, in spirit, and we couldn’t be happier for you.
Also, and this is important, please remember that as EOPS students, you entered college with some challenges. You didn’t have a college trust fund waiting for you. You had to navigate the complicated financial aid process, which is never easy. Maybe you are an immigrant and you had to learn English. There is a good chance you are the first in your family to attend college, and you had to figure all of this out on your own. You had to choose a major and, for most of you, a transfer campus, and you had to go through the typical stress of midterms and finals and term papers and all those things that cause every college student stress, even in the best of circumstances.
But…you also had to spend nearly a year and a half doing all of these things online! When you were planning for your education, the one thing not one of you thought about was how an unprecedented global pandemic might impact your studies. Suddenly, and with little warning, last spring you moved your yoga or dance classes into your living room. You learned how to do biology, physics and chemistry labs online, with pretend experiments. You figured out how to do your art and music and theater projects in your home for your various arts classes, and you went to a virtual library to get references for your term papers. Sometimes your WiFi crashed, and sometimes your home was a little too noisy to concentrate. You still did it.
Think about that for a minute. You.still.did.it. Do you realize how special this is?
I hope that you will remember this moment for the rest of your lives. You were presented with an unprecedented challenge, in addition to the inherent challenges of being a college student, and you did what you do best—you kept going! You didn’t stop, you didn’t give up, you didn’t quit. You kept going. And now you are college graduates.
From the bottom of my heart, as I end my counseling career at LAPC, I salute the wonderful, resilient, brilliant, and inspiring students who make up the EOPS Class of 2021. Congratulations, and I know I speak for all of my colleagues as I tell you that it has been a supreme honor and a blessing to serve you.