When you read this, it will be approximately one year from the pandemic altering the lives we knew. As we turned the calendars from 2020 to 2021, many of us hoped to leave a lot of things behind in 2020 and not bring them with us into the new year. Maybe it is always a little like that, but it seemed more necessary this year than in recent memory. However, intellectually, we know that it takes more than a ball dropping to bring the change we are hoping for.
I hope we brought some of the lessons we learned with us, because some of them came at a very high cost. We lost loved ones. We missed celebrations. We dealt with uncertainty beyond imagination just a year ago.Â
As we mark a year of our lives being altered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we often reflect on what we lost and on the things we missed. In these pages though, we celebrate some very big, life-changing moments that happened for students and alumni this last year. Moments that were years in the making but happened in the middle of the swirl of chaos in our lives.Â
Blake Trienen ’11, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, may or may not be the first Jackrabbit to win a Major League Baseball World Series. Kendra Alvizures ’19 is the first Jackrabbit to be accepted into the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program. And Hattie Seten, current Students’ Association president, became just the second Jackrabbit ever to be named a Rhodes scholar.
These are big moments that would be worth celebrating any year, but now, when it can be easy to only measure the challenges, we have a lot to celebrate too. You don’t need to look any further than pages 30-31 and all those Future Jackrabbits to know a lot of really great things happened.
With loyal heart so true,
Andi Fouberg
President & CEO of Alumni Association
