Inspiration and promise mark CU Boulder graduating class

For the thousands of students whose post-graduation lives are about to begin, Thursday marks the end of one journey and the launching point for another.

More than 8,000 students will receive degrees from the University of Colorado on Thursday at Folsom Field — 6,083 bachelor’s degree candidates, 1,487 master’s degree candidates, 199 law degree candidates and 414 doctoral degree candidates, including fall 2017 and spring and summer 2018 graduates.

The university will also posthumously honor Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, the school’s first black woman graduate, who was barred from walking at graduation 100 years ago.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown — a CU alumna and the first openly LGBTQ governor in the country — will deliver the commencement address.

“I’ll be sharing my personal story, and how my time at CU set me on a path toward and prepared me for public service,” Brown wrote in an email to the Daily Camera. “And I’ll also talk about the national political and social landscapes, and how they are different from my undergrad years.

“For example, we’ve taken a step backward for our immigrant communities, specifically our Dreamers, who face enormous uncertainties. Some of our students graduating at CU and their success is proof that they are an integral part of our communities, our culture, and our economy. They embody the ideals of the American Dream. We’ve made a lot of progress since I was a student, but we still have a long way to go.

“I want the newest alumni to walk away inspired to take an active role as a citizen, to speak up for the voiceless, and to use their education at CU as a springboard to making change for a better world.”

Among those thousands of newly minted alumni will be an aspiring journalist, professor, entrepreneur and counselor, each of whom hope to shape and improve their communities.

‘It’s up in the air’

During a reporting trip in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, Canada, Nick Mott set down his microphone and other audio gear to snap a photograph, only to watch a sled dog named Harpoon snatch it and dash away through the snow.

Mott was able to retrieve his gear, somehow undamaged but tinged with the smell of the dog’s seal-based diet, and continue to report on the climate and cultural changes shaping life in northeast Canada. His work was part of a series by “Threshold,” a public radio show and podcast, and the season is set to publish later this fall.

The 28-year-old was initially connected with “Threshold’s” creator, Amy Martin, when she sought interns during his first class at CU. He’s a student in the journalism master’s program in CU’s College of Media, Communication and Information, and he was an intern and then production fellow and then assistant reporter with Threshold.

“My most rewarding professional and personal experiences have been through Threshold, this connection that I made through the (CU Center for Environmental Journalism) my very first day in grad school,” said Mott, whose focus is in environmental journalism.

Graduate students in the program are tasked with completing two of three capstone options: a media internship, a course called News Corp and a professional project. Mott ultimately completed all three. He’d already earned undergraduate degrees in sociology and psychology from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in anthropology from Colorado State University, but this program helped him pursue the writing career he’d imagined since childhood. He moved from Fort Collins to Boulder for the program.

“I just wanted to write,” he said. “Storytelling is how we engage each other as humans and is one of the biggest ways to make change and difference in the world.”

This year, Mott also created an eight-episode series for REI called “Take it From Me” — the company’s first in-house podcast — after he blogged for the company’s co-op journal.

After graduation, he plans to continue working for Threshold and freelancing. Neither requires him to live in any particular place, so he’s not yet sure where he’ll live after his lease expires in August.

“It’s up in the air at this point where I’ll be after August,” Mott said. “I’m excited for whatever’s next.”

‘It’s a time to celebrate’

Victoria Dadet is the valedictorian of the ethnic students department’s graduating class, which means she’ll give a speech Friday at the department’s recognition ceremony.

She’s not sure what exactly she’ll say yet — she has some notes and ideas jotted in her phone — but she knows she wants to honor both the teachers and the students in the department.

“I’m definitely going to focus on my experience in the ethnic studies department,” Dadet said. She completed a second degree in psychology, both of which are in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I know I want to focus on the students, too. One of the things that I was thinking about was how I’ve learned just as much from my classmates as I have from the professors that I’ve had. I want to focus on the students because it’s a time to celebrate us completing our degrees.”

This year, the 21-year-old from the northwest suburbs of Chicago was the gender and ethnic studies editor for the CU Honors Journal, an annual interdisciplinary undergraduate journal. She was also the co-president of the Black Student Alliance, during which she promoted the visibility of the organization, helped other officers, attended meetings with student groups and administrators, provided a face for the organization and organized BSA meetings.

During BSA meetings, she was conscious to facilitate discussions that were intellectual and educational, she said. They talked about, for example, the spectrum of blackness and the African diaspora.

“Everybody seems to have this hunger for it,” she said. “It’s never difficult to get people to be engaged. They’re ready. They come to the meetings ready to have these discussions.

“I think it’s because of where we are, because this is a (predominantly white institution), it just feels like we’re invisible. That’s why there’s this hunger to be in a space where you feel visible and have these discussions that are specific to your own experiences that erased most of the time.”

During her time at CU, Dadet also interned and then worked part time for New Era Colorado, an organization that aims to train and educate young leaders in the state. She helped register people to vote and then concentrated efforts on providing people with the information they needed to vote. She even drove around campus in a golf cart to shorten voters’ walks to the polls.

After graduation, she’ll work fulltime as a New Era Colorado advocacy manager for abortion access, supervising and managing part-time organizers in the field.

Dadet envisions herself someday as a professor. She most enjoyed her ethnic studies classes taught by women of color, and their work inspired her.

“(I see myself) working at a university, being a professor,” Dadet said. “After having all those really great experiences with my women of color professors, it’s just something to aspire to be.”

‘It’s a story about relationships’

When the CU Makers Collective Club pitched a project incorporating lights in clothing, Emily Daub jumped at the opportunity to help.

That grew into a passion project and, ultimately, her senior project. On Friday, student and community dancers, as well as Daub herself, wore costumes that she designed and affixed with LED lights and other electronics — called wearable technology. They danced in a show that she choreographed and orchestrated at the Black Box Experimental Theater. And the lights in their costumes changed color based on code she wrote, with help from a graduate student.

When the dancers neared each other, the colored lights in their costumes began to share colors.

“For the piece, all the wearables talk to each other,” Daub said, noting they used radio transmissions to do so. “It’s a story about relationships between people and how we all mold and shape one another.”

The 21-year-old from Bangor, Maine, is a student in CU’s ATLAS Institute in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and her major is technology, arts and media — where students use a mix of technical and creative skills, or, as Daub calls it, the “land for misfit toys.” In her case, the major allowed her to combine passions for wearables and dance.

Daub works behind a second-floor door in the ATLAS building, in a place called the Laboratory for Playful Computation. She has a soldering iron, a box of fabrics, a hot glue gun and small plastic drawers organized by category (batteries, ribbon wire, sensors, etc.).

“If I find something I’m interested in, I’m really good at following the thread down the rabbit hole of whatever I’m interested in and whatever that may be,” Daub said. “For the last couple years, it’s been wearables: creating clothing with embedded electronics, which includes lights, sensors and microcontrollers.”

Daub said that she could envision herself creating two businesses. In one scenario, she would create clothing lines for people that are designed to fit well. Clothes have never accommodated her body type, she said, and that bothers her because of the amount of data collection companies could do to make clothes that fit people well.

Her hope would be that people would buy, and throw away, fewer clothes, which would lessen the effect of clothing production on the environment. In the other scenario, she would develop more advanced wearable technology.

Regardless, she knows that she’ll take a path that brings her fulfillment and joy.

“I really try to not spend my time doing things where I feel like I’m constantly questioning, ‘Why am I doing this?'” Daub said. “I allow myself to have the answer to that question be, ‘Because I’m enjoying it.’ I feel like a lot of people don’t have that answer to that many things in their lives … of things they just enjoy.”

‘It’s really inspiring’

Erika Orona swelled with pride when a group of Lafayette middle schoolers organized a rally to support Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, and invited her to attend.

The 21-year-old had worked with the group at Angevine Middle School during an after school program called Public Achievement, in which CU undergraduates mentor Boulder- and Lafayette-based youth and guide them through the creation of social justice projects. Although she no longer worked with this particular group, they wanted her there.

They marched more than a mile from Lafayette City Hall to Waneka Park to raise awareness and show their support.

“My favorite memory is seeing my students grow,” Orona said. “They were the ones leading it. They were the ones talking in it. It was so amazing seeing them being in the front of the line and motivating everybody and talking about their experiences and organizing everything. It was amazing to see how much they did.”

Orona is a psychology major with an ethnic studies minor, and she’s found fulfillment during three semesters of working with Public Achievement.

“It sounded really cool to work with students,” Orona said. “I’ve always wanted to work with youth later on in my career. I thought it would be a good opportunity to get some experience. It was also a little bit different for me because it was a little bit out of my comfort zone, and I felt like it would challenge me and it would help me grow.”

Orona attended Front Range Community College in Longmont and Westminster for two years before transferring to CU to complete her degree, and she’ll be the first in her family to earn a degree.

“My first class was psychology,” Orona said. “From then on, it was always psychology.”

This semester, she’s visited Boulder’s Casey Middle School every Thursday to work with a group of eight students. The students this semester, too, chose immigration as the topic they wanted to study. They made a video with skits about the effects of immigration and deportation.

“It’s really inspiring,” she said. “They are so passionate about the topic they’re working with. They know so much. They’re willing to do so much to change people’s perspectives on it.”

Orona grew up in Longmont and lives with her family there now, an arrangement she said helps separate her school life from her home life.

After graduation, she’d like to continue working with youth for a year before returning to school to earn her master’s degree. She’d like to become a high school counselor or higher education adviser, a decision inspired by a high school counselor who encouraged her as she applied to college, helped her find financial aid and scholarships opportunities and stayed in touch throughout her time in college.

She wants to do the same for others.

Cassa Niedringhaus: 303-473-1106, cniedringhaus@dailycamera.com