19 Fun Facts About the Class of 2019

This morning marked Mary Washington’s 108th Commencement. It’s a time-held tradition that’s signaled the turning of a page, the changing of a chapter, year after year, for more than a century. Still, each class is different. Here are 19 things that set the Class of 2019 apart from the crowd.

1. It includes 1,082 undergraduate students
2. Most of them started kindergarten in 2002
3. Bill Clinton was president when they were born
4. They’re Devils, and they won the Devil-Goat Day challenge three out of four times
5. They all read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Common Read their first year
6. The UMW Classic Crew sweatshirt was the bookstore item they purchased the most
7. Four seniors – the most ever – received the Darden Award, finishing with a 4.0 GPA
8. More than a quarter of this year’s graduates studied abroad
9. Most out-of-state students – 31 – are from Maryland
10. The second most out-of-state students – 10 – hail from New Jersey
11. Combined, the graduating athletes garnered 878 wins throughout their college careers
12. They won 25 conference championships and advanced to 24 NCAA Championships
13. They lay claim to an impressive men’s rugby national title. Go, Eagles!
14. They’ll begin careers at top organizations, like NASA, Disney and Deloitte
15. They’ll get master’s at, among others, William & Mary, UVA and George Washington University
16. They’ve claimed jobs as far away as South Korea, Morocco, Taiwan and the Netherlands
17. The student who traveled the longest from home that first year came from Australia
18. More than a quarter – 284 of them – are first-generation college students
19. Forty-seven will leave Mary Washington with University Honors

Congrats, UMW Class of 2019!