From Eight Countries to One Community: Kentucky Wesleyan Celebrates Class of 2026

Kentucky Wesleyan College conferred degrees on 181 graduates during its commencement ceremony Friday, May 2, at Owensboro Christian Church, celebrating a class that arrived from 18 states and eight countries to find home in Owensboro.

The ceremony capped four years for a class that chose Kentucky Wesleyan for its close-knit community, hands-on learning and the promise of being known, not just enrolled. Nearly half of the graduates were first-generation college students, and 89 earned academic honors. Among the graduates were the College’s first MBA students from the inaugural cohort.

Co-valedictorians Kai Marchiony and Marc Stoever addressed their classmates, reflecting on community, perseverance and the people who made their success possible.

Marchiony, who studied Mathematics with a minor in Physics, emphasized that graduation wasn’t just about individual achievement.

“This is the defining moment of your educational path, the twilight of your collegiate careers, but this is not a moment only about you,” Marchiony said. “You are accepting a diploma for all the people who have been there for you, encouraged you, studied with you, and most importantly, the ones who are here to cheer for you.”

Marchiony closed with a quote from Winston Churchill: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

Stoever, who studied Business Administration with a minor in Economics, came to Kentucky Wesleyan from Germany understanding, on a good day, about every second word. If someone spoke faster or had a strong accent, maybe every fourth. His Scottish friend? “I understood absolutely nothing,” Stoever told his classmates Friday.

He would go back to his room exhausted, falling asleep at 8 p.m., his brain working overtime just to keep up. “Honestly, I thought college would be academically challenging, but I didn’t expect listening to be a full-time job,” Stoever said.

A few weeks later, something changed. He started having dreams in English.

“That didn’t happen because I suddenly became fluent overnight,” Stoever said. “It happened because of all of you, who repeated your sentences two or three times, who slowed down, who made sure I and so many other international students felt included. That small act of patience made a huge difference, and it’s something I will never forget.”

His message to classmates: challenges aren’t something to avoid. They’re what shape us. “This college gave us more than an education,” Stoever said. “It gave us a community. It gave us challenges that forced us to grow. And it gave us people who made that growth possible.”

Commencement speaker Keith Sharber, a Kentucky Wesleyan trustee and retired business executive, challenged graduates to pursue their dreams with determination. Sharber was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters during the ceremony. He shared the story of U.S. Air Force Major Melanie Kluesner, who at age seven watched an F-16 flyover at a college football game and declared to her father, “That will be me someday.”

She never looked back. She learned to fly a small Cessna, earned her engineering degree, joined the Air Force and eventually commanded the F-35 Lightning II Demo Team, flying at 1.6 times the speed of sound.

“Beyond being a few hundred pages apart in a dictionary, the distance between a dream and reality for you will likely be filled with prayer, hope, grit, determination and hard work,” Sharber said. “Use that purple key,” he told graduates, referring to their diplomas, “to open your doors of opportunity.”

The College also awarded an honorary doctorate of science to Dr. Gwendolyn (Ford) Lynch, a 1986 Kentucky Wesleyan graduate who is now a neuro critical care specialist at Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Lynch was unable to attend due to a family medical emergency, but her story exemplified the career readiness Kentucky Wesleyan cultivates. She came to Owensboro from Canton, Ohio, after research showed Kentucky Wesleyan graduates had a 90% acceptance rate to medical schools. Armed with her chemistry degree, she went on to Ohio State for medical school and a residency at Yale.

The Class of 2026 represented students from Kentucky, Alabama, Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin. International students came from Germany, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, South Africa, Spain and Sweden.