Every soon-to-be University of Georgia graduate knows that graduation night isn’t over until the iconic fireworks launch and light up the sky. Kate Hall expects both the fireworks and waterworks.
Hall says those tears are going to be bittersweet. Sad because her time at UGA is ending, but also happy to have lived something worth missing.
As this year’s undergraduate student speaker, Hall hopes she can emulate the emotional roller coaster of the UGA student experience.
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“I just love those fireworks when you get admitted, and then when you graduate, because it feels like the most wonderful way to open and close out a chapter,” she said. “It’s so poetic, so when I see the fireworks, everyone throwing their caps, and all the smiles on everyone’s faces, I’m going to feel so much joy. I can’t wait for that moment.”
Searching for community and career
That ride began for Hall when she realized she no longer wanted to earn her degree in business — a route she had planned for since high school in Cumming. While changing her major was a difficult decision, Hall knew from the very first public relations class she took that she had discovered the right path for her.
For Hall, community is everything, and the community that the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication offered made her truly understand the impact she can make in public relations.
Undergraduate Commencement speaker Kate Hall near the Journalism Building. Hall is graduating with her bachelor’s degree in advertising and public relations. (Dorothy Kozlowski/UGA)
“It feels like an entirely different world moving to college and being uprooted from everything you’ve ever known, so I think having those communities to plug myself into made it so much more manageable. It felt like home,” Hall said.
Hall was fortunate enough to find those bonds not just around campus but across the country and the globe. Between her work with the Student Government Association, studies through UGA at Oxford, and AdPR in New York and Washington, D.C., she saw the benefits that connections can have on both personal and professional growth.
Growth and connection have also defined Hall’s role as a communications intern at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, where she’s promoted everything from summer camps to visits from the Department of the Interior.
“It was the right kind of community and uplifting work environment where I felt like I could grow, literally and figuratively, and just learn more about UGA as a whole. It’s become a home away from home where I’ve learned so much,” Hall said.
Writing for change
Those opportunities helped Hall solidify what she wants to focus on in her next chapter: lifting people up on a national scale. After graduation, she’s heading to Washington, D.C., where she hopes to work alongside a lawmaker to help drive meaningful change.
“I definitely want to be in the middle of the action and help push change to do good in our world,” she said. “I’m a very goal minded person, so it’s nice to have something to kind of look forward to. I’m not going to limit myself.”
As a writer of everything from poetry to press releases, Hall believes there’s a lot of power in words. So, when the opportunity arose to be the Commencement student speaker, she knew she had to give it a shot.
She hopes her speech reminds classmates to reflect on what they’ve built at UGA — the communities they’ve found, the paths they’ve carved, and the passions they’ve pursued.
“While we haven’t actually passed through the Arch yet, we’ve all been passing through it this whole time through the different experiences that UGA has to offer,” she said. “The Arch is a story, and it’s a story that holds everyone who has come to this university and graduated from it.”
