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Why I'm Excited about Graduation

Like our senior class, I’m looking forward to graduation, and not just our own, though that event is one of the highlights of each year at Colorado Academy.

I’m especially excited for commencement exercises on June 14, 2014 in Buck Shaw Stadium at Santa Clara University in California. While I won’t be in attendance, I will still be cheering for Nehemias Luna (CA ’10). 

Nehemias was one of the first students to take part in our Horizons Program at CA, which was started 15 years ago on our campus. Nehemias was attending Knapp Elementary School when he began participating in Horizons, a highly successful enrichment program for students from Denver Public Schools.  In fifth grade, Nehemias transferred from Knapp to CA and graduated from here as part of the Class of 2010. None of this, we know, was easy.

While he was here, Nehemias played basketball and soccer for CA; he took part in our specialty choirs, and availed himself of the many opportunities that this school has to offer. He did the same at Santa Clara: he was a student worker in the Global Engagement Office there, he studied abroad in Barcelona during his junior year, he ?volunteered at local schools through the Santa Clara Community Action Program, and he a chartered student organization dedicated to applying activism and justice to address social issues in and around the campus community.

He was a four-year Daniels Scholar in college, and he will soon graduate with a bachelor’s degree in finance and a minor in international business from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. While in college, Nehemias secured internships with Google’s Building Opportunities for Leadership and Development (BOLD) Immersion and K-12 Education Outreach teams. And he also came back to CA as an intern and teaching assistant, helping younger students in the Horizons program.
When Nehemias walks across that stage in June, he will be the first member of his family to earn a college degree, something he says he will cherish for the rest of his life, and something for which all of us at CA will be equally proud.  Just this week, Nehemias let us know that he’s landed a job for the fall with Texas Instruments, one of the top 20 semiconductor producing companies in the world.

Godspeed, Neo.  Paraphrasing journalist Tom Brokaw, “You may think of your diploma as the ticket to a good life” … for you, we also know that “it is your ticket to change the world.”  
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