The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture salutes the more than 100 student Sorin Fellows who completed their studies at Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, and Holy Cross College in 2020. In all, 75 undergraduates and 28 graduate and professional school Sorin Fellows joined their classmates in virtual commencement ceremonies earlier this month.

Among this year's Sorin Fellows undergraduates, 9 students graduated summa cum laude, 12 magna cum laude, and 11 cum laude. 29 of our Sorin Fellows were accepted into national disciplinary honors societies and 14 received departmental awards in recognition of excellence, including valedictorian finalist Christian Dennis, honored with the Rev. Thomas A. Steiner Prize for "outstanding students in the College of Engineering who have displayed all-around excellence as students."

In the Law School, 7 of our 8 Sorin Fellows graduated with honors including dCEC Polking Fellow Hope Steffensen, who finished summa cum laude. "The de Nicola Center enriched my experience at Notre Dame because it helped me realize that, in the end, education is not just about intense studying and stress," Steffensen said. "In the end, we are pursuing the true and the beautiful and trying to make a difference in the world. I am so thankful the dCEC was there to help me keep everything in perspective during my time in law school."

In a video honoring the Sorin Fellows of the Class of 2020, de Nicola Center director O. Carter Snead told the graduates, "Our principal aspiration has been to help you cultivate your gifts and talents, to deepen your faith life, to enhance your intellectual experience, but most of all to cultivate and develop enduring friendships." He concluded, "May God bless you, and may his mother Mary intercede for you and your families today, and always."

"Being a Sorin Fellow has put me right in the midst of a community doing precisely what I had hoped for when I was in high school choosing a college: exploring, understanding, and bringing to bear on our society the vast treasures of the Catholic Church," said Noelle Johnson, an undergraduate who will return to Notre Dame this Fall to pursue her Masters in Theological Studies. "To put a long story short, it is because of my involvement with the de Nicola Center that I know exactly why I am at Notre Dame."

The dCEC's Sorin Fellows student formation program, now in its sixth year, provides Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College undergraduate and graduate students opportunities and resources to integrate their social, intellectual, and spiritual values in the context of their collegiate experience and in the discernment and pursuit of their vocations. More than 300 students participated in the program in 2019-2020. For more information on the program, visit https://ethicscenter.nd.edu/programs/student-formation/sorin-fellows/