• Commencement 2023
• Featured
• News
• College of Arts & Sciences
• Law School
• Sawyer Business School

The Suffolk community celebrated its newest graduates

Starting law school online during a pandemic was daunting. Deferring for a year occurred to Sarah Gonsenhauser, JD ’23, of Northborough. But she had her heart set on enrolling at Suffolk Law, so she took a deep breath and jumped into 1L on Zoom.

On Sunday evening, at the Leader Bank Pavilion overlooking Boston Harbor, Gonsenhauser graduated magna cum laude, ready to take the bar exam in July and pursue a career in employment law.

Fellow graduates Claire Remillard, JD ’23, Laina Dowd, JD ’23, and Julia Nasiek, JD ’23, also recalled the strange early days of COVID-19 social distancing restrictions that turned them into faces on a screen—until Dowd reached out to the other two via text and the trio bonded over rollicking group chats until they could meet in person. “We are best friends forever!” said Dowd, a double Ram from Boston who plans to work in wealth management. “It was a strange time to make friends, but we got very, very close.”

Remillard, who recently moved to Maine, said her favorite thing about learning the law at Suffolk was the emphasis on collaboration. “We are not cutthroat—we really want each other to succeed. That is not the case at many other law schools.”

The students were among 400 new alumni in the Class of 2023, with 372 JD degrees and 28 graduate law degrees awarded. The ceremony was the third of...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiWWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnN1ZmZvbGsuZWR1L25l...