SF STATE NEWS -- Twelve outstanding graduates will be honored during San Francisco State University’s 119th Commencement ceremony — the first to be held virtually, due to the COVID-19 pandemic — on Thursday, June 18, representing their more than 7,700 peers in the Class of 2020.
The honor is part of a longstanding tradition in which each of the University’s six academic colleges selects two students, one undergraduate and one graduate, for the honor of representing their classmates during the ceremony by wearing their college’s academic hood.
Jessica Lee Dailey, College of Liberal & Creative Arts
Jessica Lee Dailey received her Master of Arts in Anthropology last summer. Her thesis, “Choosing Resistance: Social Power and Alternative Birth Care in Sonoma County, California,” explores alternative forms of prenatal and birth care and the values of practitioners and their clients who embraced alternative medicine and opposed aspects of traditional medicine. In 2018, Dailey received the University’s Jay P. Young Excellence Award for her fieldwork. In November 2018 she presented a paper based on her thesis research at the annual American Anthropological Association conference, representing SF State on a panel about reproductive decision-making.
Dailey was one of five students accepted into a Ph.D. program in medical anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where she began studying in the fall of 2019. For her dissertation, she is researching the complicated ways social contexts mediate access to, experiences with and health outcomes around maternity and birth care.
Randella Louise Jones, College of Liberal & Creative Arts
An accomplished violinist and pianist, Randella Louise Jones was a Dean’s List honoree, a recipient of the John Handy Scholarship for Jazz Studies and a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship recipient.
While studying abroad in Jamaica, Jones taught violin with the country’s National Youth Orchestra and conducted research into the folk music traditions of the African diaspora. She co-directs Son Umbé, a youth Afro-Mexican Son Jarocho ensemble at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. She plans to earn a teaching credential at SF State and become an elementary school music teacher. She also aspires to complete graduate work in the field of ethnomusicology.