SAN MARCOS, Texas -- The graduating Class of 2020 has been dealt a pretty rough hand this semester, but despite it all we still get to celebrate their accomplishments. For one Texas State graduate, she knows all about looking on the bright side of things, despite losing the chance to walk the stage.

What You Need To Know


  • Texas State University 2020 commencement ceremony canceled due to pandemic

  • Kadie Blair persevered through a lifetime of health problems and graduated

  • Set out to be a child life specialist, and is obtaining graduate degree

Kadie Blair has spent the last few years at Texas State working toward her degree in Human Development and Family Sciences. The funny thing is, that wasn’t her first choice. Like many college graduates, there was a little trial and error along the way.

"I tried five different majors in college to find what I wanted to do," Blair said. "I knew that I want to do something with kids and I liked medicine and I wanted to help people, which is very broad. I googled basically like ‘kids,' 'helping,' and like 'emotions,’ or something.

That's when she settled on her decision to become a child life specialist.

"​And so I said, ‘Oh, I can do that for people and I can kind of give back to what I've received in a way," Blair said. "I had one of those at the hospital. I remember her sitting with me when I had surgery. I didn't want my mom to leave the room. I was afraid if she left something bad would happen. So this person would come sit with me so my mom could eat or go to the bathroom or take a shower."

Speaking about her time dealing with health issues, Blair said for more than a decade, she's been poked and prodded by medical professionals trying to diagnose her. After being misdiagnosed and overmedicated, Blair said she had chronic fatigue. Ultimately, her diagnosis was severe asthma, and she treats it with a steroid. She also developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder stemming from a concussion in middle school basketball practice, which makes concentrating difficult for her. She also has a possible loss of prism in her eye which doctors haven't been able to confirm the root cause of.

“I’ve had health troubles since I was born basically and we’d never really figured out what they were. There was a laundry list of false diagnoses,” Blair said “When I got my concussion in eighth grade, it really impacted how I thought and I really wasn't able to think like a normal human. My brain was just kind of like fried. I can read something and not know what I read. I can read the whole chapter, you can ask me questions about that, and I'm like, 'Huh, that was there?' So that's just been interesting to have to learn how to sit down and say okay, this word means this and do that with entire textbooks for three years.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Blair had spinal surgery in 2010 to correct her scoliosis. That meant more hospital stays, but Blair said going through these challenges has given her a positive outlook on life, which has been especially important right now.

“Being able to kind of overcome that at such a young age, I think it's just given me a mentality of ‘This is what we have to deal with, so let's just do it and there's no point in being sad about it when I could choose joy and I could choose to enjoy where I'm at, regardless of what's happening to me,'” Blair said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted students' semesters, Blair had to look on the bright side, even when it came to changing life plans outside of her education. Originally set to wed her fiancé in a big ceremony in September, Blair has had to move up and scale down her plans to a backyard July celebration.

"Both my parents and my grandparents were married in July and so that's just kind of sweet to be part of that and just get to do it early and say ‘The world is kind of falling down around us and we're all having to reshift everything, but we can still celebrate us and what God has given us and get to celebrate our relationship and enjoy our time together.’ So, why not?" Blair said.

Despite the odds thrown at her, Blair is graduating from Texas State University a year early with honors. She is also planning to attend grad school.

"The fact that I don't get to walk the stage or jump in the [San Marcos] river doesn't diminish the fact that I still graduated in three years and I still got a 4.0 in the middle of the pandemic. That doesn't change anything. It doesn't diminish the value of anything," Blair said.

As for the message she's sending to her fellow Class of 2020?

"We had a set of expectations of how this was supposed to go and it didn't happen that way. And that's okay, we can grieve for what we wanted, but we can still celebrate with what we have. I still graduated and there are a lot of people that don't do that, whether it's high school, college, graduate school. You still did it. And regardless of what your circumstances were, you did it in a pandemic which nobody's ever done before. So that's just a really cool accomplishment and only the Class of 2020 gets to say ‘I did this and I did it in a pandemic,’" Blair said.