Tagged: ODI Graduation

The path to graduation is riddled with roadblocks for every Buckeye. For parenting students, however, attending college brings even more challenges and requires even more sacrifices—making graduation even more special.

ODI’s ACCESS Collaborative Program honored this important occasion for the class of 2024 with its Scholar Honors Reception in late April. The event recognized parenting students on the cusp of graduation and their children’s academic achievements, in spirit with the program’s two-generation educational approach.

The first-generation experience of students persevering toward graduation often includes obsticles. Young Scholar Brian Finley, Aalissia Thomas, Sarah Al-Hashemi, and Say Yes Scholar Navi Draper share their experiences and left words of wisdom for future graduates in this Lantern article.

Read the full first-gen article.

Hamidou Sy always knew he wanted to be a civil engineer, even before he understood what engineering was. As a child growing up in Mauritania in West Africa, Sy saw the impact of a lack of engineering firsthand.

“Whenever we would travel from province to province, state to state, we would see terrible accidents on the roadway. We would see bad infrastructure, inadequate water resources,” Sy recalled. “That was a call to action for me.”

When Luis Mercado walks across the Schottenstein Center stage to get his diploma this December, it will be the final steps in a journey he worried he might never finish.

Mercado came to The Ohio State University as a first-year student in 2018, drawn by the support and opportunities provided by the Young Scholars Program (YSP), which he joined as a sixth grader growing up in South Lorain. That support took on a whole new meaning three years later, however, when Mercado received life-changing news: cancer.

Telling her classmates to "trade fear for hope," the first Black woman to get a doctorate in dance studies from The Ohio State University spoke at the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) graduation ceremony on Dec. 14.

"I hope we will lead with love and create beyond our most wildest dreams," Alesondra "Alex" Christmas told her fellow graduates and their friends and family piled into the Ohio Union's Great Hall Meeting Room. "Let your hopes be fierce and unwavering."

As an aspiring sports agent, Daechanea Williams has dreams of someday supporting athletes as they compete on the world's biggest stages. Thanks to the Young Scholars Program (YSP), however, Williams now has the opportunity to walk across another big stage: the Schottenstein Center's graduation stage as part of the Autumn 2023 commencement ceremony this December.

With a line borrowed from the great orator Frederick Douglass that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress,” class of 2022 graduates affiliated with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion [ODI] were hailed with an in-person graduation ceremony at Hale Hall on Thursday, May 5, 2022.