When 2020 graduates gather online for the Class of 2020 Celebration on Sunday, June 13, they will be Zooming in from locations across the globe—from Brooklyn to Seattle and from Tel Aviv to Tanzania. When these seniors left campus in March 2020, few of them realized they would not be returning to campus for more than a year.

The Class of 2020 embarked on their postbaccalaureate careers in a time of huge uncertainty, in the midst of a global pandemic. Many returned to their childhood homes. Most have started their careers working from remote locations, meeting with colleagues and mentors via Zoom. They have had to let go of where they thought they would be now and learn to embrace a vastly different year, work and social life, and global landscape.

To honor their journeys, we reached out to eight members of the Class of 2020 who agreed to share candid reflections on their lives over this past year. These alumni live in very different locations and circumstances, but they share a common reality. The global pandemic has impacted each of them in profound ways, causing them to put their pre-pandemic plans on pause, to take stock, and—in many cases—to rethink their priorities. They’ve learned to let go of what might have been and, in so doing, they’ve grown stronger and wiser in their ability to shape what might be. We hope you are inspired by their stories of resilience as they learned to do what Jelani Taylor ’20 calls, “play it different.”

Read the story from Alumni Affairs and Development.