Graduating Seniors

Alice Momany Senior Campus And Community Editor

When Remy Allen was a senior in high school, they went viral, and their life changed forever.

A photograph of future young Black educators went viral on the internet, and Allen was front and center. After the photo circulated widely, a liberal arts school in Oxford, Ohio, reached out to Allen, recruiting them for the school’s education program.

That’s when Allen knew they were going to Miami University.

“I feel like education is the most impactful job you can have,” Allen said. “I’m very passionate about the education of our youth, and where education is going is kind of scary, but I feel like my passion can bring a change in that space.”

Over the next four years, Allen would go on to use their passion to make changes at Miami.

They became the president of Black Women Empowered during their sophomore year and have held that position since. They helped reestablish the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Incorporated on campus, they are involved with multiple student organizations and they are a resident assistant in Anderson Hall.

This year, Allen began their teaching journey as a student teacher at the Hamilton High School Freshman Campus, and when they graduate, they plan to teach English language arts to seventh graders.

“I plan to teach for a couple of years, and then I want to go to grad school because I want to work my way up the education ladder,” Allen said.

Throughout their various involvements, Allen met friends, faculty and staff that made their time at Miami memorable.

“The most important thing I learned [at Miami] is how you treat people says a lot,” Allen said. “I’m happy that when I leave Miami, I will know that I was loved by a lot of people.”

One of those people is JaTayzia Agee, a senior education studies major. Agee and Allen lived in the same hall together during their first year at Miami, and Allen’s contagious energy attracted Agee.

“Their warm personality is what really struck me and wanted me to

JACK SCHMELZINGER SPORTS EDITOR

As a walk-on for the Miami University Track and Field team during her first year at Miami University, Gabby Cossio took two thirdplace medals in team races at the Mid-American Conference Indoor Championships. During her sophomore year, she was out for almost the whole season with quadriceps tears in both legs.

She returned toward the end of the season, though, and posted a personal record 1:03.74 time in 400 hurdles and came in second place for the 4x400 relay at the MAC Outdoor Championships.

Her junior season, she was injured again. She used that year to rebuild her body and balance her mind.

“Being injured was a blessing in disguise,” Cossio said. “It let me slow down and realign my focus. It helped remind me that my value doesn’t come from my sport and my times on the track. I focused on my faith and put my trust in God and started to take the pressure off of myself.”

After she was cleared to compete, Cossio said track became even more enjoyable. Now in her senior year, Cossio is soaking it all in before she moves to Chicago for a job she has lined up in finance, which is her ma- jor at Miami.

“I’ve really just been using senior year I think to soak in every single memory,” Cossio said. “I love the sport. I love running. But even more, I just love my team. I love being able to do really hard workouts with my team and afterwards just lay on the floor with the girls.”

Cossio has had two siblings graduate from college already. Her sister Anna ran track at Washington University in St. Louis, and her brother Luis also ran track at Notre Dame University.

“There’s a lot of joy in seeing her graduate,” Luis Cossio, Gabby’s father, said. “But there is definitely a bit of sorrow in that. I think most parents who have gone to college know that that period of time is very, very special. And oftentimes you don’t want to see it end.”

Before this season, Cossio was finally put on scholarship.

“Helen and I were really happy,” Luis Cossio said. “Because she had been working hard and not always having the success she wanted, but she continued relentlessly towards making herself better, and the coaches, to their great credit, acknowledged that.” stay close to them,” Agee said. “Remy just has the best personality I’ve ever met.”

Cossio has had great times at Miami. She says she loves being on the track team because it’s like one huge family.

Although Allen just started student teaching, Agee said she has been learning from them throughout the past four years. “One thing that I learned from Remy is to be myself at all times,” Agee said. “Remy is really open and really out in the community and just their authentic self.” But Allen’s friends and students aren’t the only people who have learned from them. Allen has learned a lot from themself.

“If I could go back,” Allen said. “[I’d] tell my freshman self, ‘See it through. It gets better. It gets so much better.’” momanyaj@miamioh.edu

“They become your brothers and sisters,” Cossio said. “At the end of the day you have close to 100 other people who are always supporting you.”

According to Cossio’s parents, she was always a good kid.

“Gabby has always been a joy,” Helen Cossio, her mother, said. “She’s a really happy, positive, bright person. We’re really proud of the way she’s handled her academic career along with her athletic career. She’s always managed to do it in a positive way. And we feel like she’s always managed to be a strong leader.”

Cossio is the vice president of Miami University Women in Finance and a member of Athletes in Action, an organization of Christian athletes on campus. She says what she’ll miss most as she leaves college is the camaraderie.

“I don’t think there’s anything better than going through a really, really intense practice, or a really, really hard 400 workout with your best friends pushing your bodies to the limit and pushing each other,” Cossio said. “And then just afterwards all going out to eat or going on to get smoothies or even just laying on the floor.”

@jackschmelznger schmelj2@miamioh.edu

Alice Momany Senior Campus And Community Editor

For Aiyana White’s whole life, she knew one thing for certain: She would go to college. Throughout her academic career, she focused on getting the perfect grades, taking the hardest classes and perfecting her college application.

The one thing she failed to focus on, however, was what she would study.

She loved education and the human body. She wanted to be an OBGYN, a teacher and a social worker. She came to Miami University as a social work major but dropped it before orientation.

Unsure of what to major in, White was encouraged by her academic advisor to take Individualized Studies Seminar (WST 251).

“We read ‘The Road Not Taken,’ and we talked about making our own road, even though it seems like it’s not possible,” White said. “So that’s when I sat back, and I reflected.”

Because of her interests in reproductive health and teaching, White decided to study sex education. Miami didn’t offer that as a major, but White knew she could make it work through the university’s Western Center for Social Impact and Innovation. “I was scared to have that much choice over what I wanted to do because it was all on me,” White said.

“At that time, I’m 18. I’m just out of high school. I don’t know how to do anything myself.”

She decided to take another course in the individualized studies major, Interdisciplinary Inquiry (WST 231), with Jacqueline Daugherty, the director of the Center. White conducted a research project on the quality of sex education people had received in seventh through 12th grade with a focus on LGBTQ+ individuals. As a nationally certified sexuality educator, Daugherty was interested in White’s research.

“Still, four years later, it was one of the strongest projects I’ve had in that class,” Daugherty said.

After that course, White was confident that the Western program was for her.

“This [program] was the perfect place for me to find myself, be myself, do everything I wanted and have all the resources and assets that I needed to do so,” White said.

In the summer of her junior year, she earned a research fellowship through the Western program to research the impacts of period poverty and how it impacts individuals based on intersectional identities. She spent the summer working with Daugherty to gather period products and donated them to the Talawanda Oxford Pantry & Social Services (TOPSS) and the Miami Valley Immigrant Coalition in Dayton.

During her junior year, she continued this work and partnered with the Sexuality Education Study Center to collect menstrual products to put in academic buildings on campus.

Over the past four years, Daugherty said she has enjoyed watching White follow her passions, even if they don’t fall under an offered major at Miami.

“She was always good at asking questions,” Daugherty said, “but I think part of the college experience as students mature is realizing that they always have more questions than answers, so watching her figure out what to do with the uncertainty innate in that field … is something I’ve really enjoyed.”

But White said learning to be comfortable with the unknown hasn’t been easy. If she could go back and give her first-year self one piece of advice, White said she would tell her to accept the uncertainty.

“Even though it feels so overwhelming and so scary and like it will never end, life goes on,” White said. “The most inevitable thing about life is [the] change from one state to another.”

@alicemomany