Archive for April, 2019

In this week’s Fitness Facts, Connie Colbert alerts us to the fact that it’s National Physical Fitness and Sports Month. It’s time to get active, and here are some ways you can be on the move.

In this week’s Mental Health Vitamin, Dr. Deb Wade has some tips about a different kind of spring cleaning — ways to clean sadness out of your mood. Spring has sprung, and you can spring right along with it.

GCU students and staff will fan out across the globe again this summer on mission trips, but several already have taken place. One of them was this spring, when 14 students went to the Dominican Republic to conduct Bible studies, serve special needs children and reach out to people on the streets and in prison. Students who hardly knew each other before the trip ended up growing close by the end of the week. Colton Davis, one of the trip leaders, said it showed him “how to actually love people the way that we’re supposed to love as believers.”

Spring commencement set a record for the number of doctoral graduates (140), and there’s a reason for that: The reputation of the GCU program continues to grow. Talk to the newly minted doctors who just went through it, and you find out why.

After starting as a business major in her freshman year of college, having two sons diagnosed with autism inspired Ember Freitas to pursue a degree that would enable her to help others like them.

Photos by David Kadlubowski GCU News Bureau The Saturday afternoon ceremony of Grand Canyon University spring commencement featured 973 online graduates of the College of Education. For a replay of the ceremony, click here.  

Photos by David Kadlubowski GCU News Bureau The Saturday morning session of spring commencement at Grand Canyon University featured 1,023 graduates, from the College of Education and the College of Nursing and Health Care Professions. For a replay of the ceremony, click here.      

Stephen Taylor refuses to let his age (76) get in the way of his goal: He wants to help ex-convicts integrate back into society. When he received his master’s degree Friday morning, it came 55 years after his bachelor’s. “I got interested in life coaching and life skill stuff because I saw the direction of substance abuse and the direction it was going,” he said.

The most unusual scene of commencement played out Friday afternoon when a 14-man mariachi band performed for one of the graduates near the 33rd Avenue entrance to campus. It was the perfect surprise, but pulling it off was a challenge for the graduate’s fiancee as well as the Events team.

Graduates of the GCU online program routinely tell incredible stories of perseverance, but Jocelyn Word of Stockton, Calif., took it to the next level. She has done it while raising four children as a single mom and after overcoming a brain aneurysm and the loss of two jobs. “I feel absolutely amazing,” she said.