Thank you, Dean Weber.
Good morning, everybody.
Mr. Mencoff, Dean Weber, members of the faculty, friends
and family, fellow graduates, fellow Doctors--
I'm still getting used to that.
What a beautiful morning this is and what an amazing gathering.
I'm extremely grateful to my peers in the Graduate Student
Council for giving me the highest honor of speaking
to you today and for the privilege of taking
in this remarkable view.
Friends, there is now no questions
that we have indeed earned these stripes.
And they look great on us.
Congratulations.
[APPLAUSE]
We made it.
But what is it that we made?
Well, maybe you're familiar with some tongue
in cheek interpretations of the letters we've
earned, of Ph.D. Is Piled Higher and Deeper, for example.
Philosophically Disturbed.
Or as a colleague once warned me, Permanent Head Damage.
[LAUGHTER]
We might laugh at these, maybe even wince a little,
but the letters also appear in the word Pathfinder,
a word that captures some of the richness of the experience we
have just completed.
What do I mean?
Well, whether we work in the lab or the library,
whether we grapple with numbers and data or meaning
and interpretation, we each have a tale
to tell of facing the challenges and opportunities for self
growth, motivation, and discovery--
and of an exploration of ourselves
as well as our subject matter.
In so many ways, we remade ourselves
as scholars, innovators, teachers, and mentors.
So today symbolizes the culmination
of narratives far deeper and far richer
than the already impressive dissertations we've written.
I suppose this is often something
that we try and capture in our written acknowledgements.
Well, my friends, today is a day to acknowledge ourselves too.
We made it, and we made it here in this special place
and among a special group of people.
How should that experience shape our future conduct?
Well, that's what I'm going over the next few minutes.
So let's appreciate the journey we've just completed
and consider the great opportunity and responsibility
we have to all those we will lead,
teach, and mentor in the days and years ahead.
Think back to your arrival at Brown.
Five, six years ago.
Maybe more.
[LAUGHTER]
How did it feel?
Maybe you felt some newness and the uncertainty
in the path that now lay ahead of you.
The sacrifices in time-- and income
because nobody came here to get rich on a grad student
stipend-- the commitment to deep study and sustained research
and the newness and uncertainty of being
a new kind of student-- one who is also
a researcher, a teacher, an advisor,
and a professional communicator.
As I recall my arrival in Providence,
nearly seven years ago, I remember feeling
both inspired and intimidated.
Inspired because Brown University had chosen me,
a young man from a tiny corner of South Wales, well
credentialed but not of academic lineage.
Intimidated not least because I was first in my family
to go to college.
That's what the blue cord is for, by the way.
I was unschooled in the who's, how's, and wherefore's
of academia.
So there was nothing but newness and uncertainty here for me.
And there was even more of it for others,
not least because so much of the Academy
still today looks and sounds an awful lot like me.
Our experiences can tell us something
about what is incumbent upon us once the hoods are
upon our shoulders and the diplomas are in our hands.
I'll tell you what that looks like for me,
and maybe that will strike a cord with you.
First, though, something for our friends and family.
I want to offer a whistle stop tour through graduate school.
We fielded you're interested questions
at so many holiday gatherings.
"What is it you're doing again in school?"
[LAUGHTER]
"You're still in school?"
[LAUGHTER]
"What are you to do with this again?"
I'm still working on that last one, folks.
But what are we going to do with it?
Friends, while you're pondering about that,
here goes, for our friends and family.
Graduate school in five easy steps.
First, the coursework.
We spent a couple of years taking advanced classes,
finding our feet, and getting to know our fields in great depth,
trying to make it through gargantuan reading
lists, that millionth problem set, or endless lab prep.
Eventually we began to speak with authority and confidence.
Then came qualifying or comprehensive exams,
an exacting sometimes brutal rite of passage
where we each showed mastery of a body of knowledge
and the skill sets crucial to our field.
Then the research.
Onward we forged through the experiments, the adviser
meetings, and oh, yes, the writing.
Oh boy, the writing.
Comp answers, lab reports, book reviews, grant applications,
dissertation proposals, chapters, abstracts,
you name it, we wrote it.
All the while, we were living to teach and present.
Communicating is not as easy as it sounds, especially
to curious, expectant audiences.
Through TA assignments, conference presentations,
workshops, and more, we learned to shape
the knowledge we create to make it exciting and accessible
to others.
And lastly, this wasn't all plain sailing.
We had our obstacles, the moments
less pleasant to recall.
The self criticism.
That patron nemesis of scholarship--
impostor syndrome, with its "Why am I here?" and "How the heck
am I still here?" questions.
That dizzy moment of, "Somebody else
wrote the book I was writing!
This is horrible!
Wait, maybe this is validating.
No, it's horrible."
[LAUGHTER]
Well, my friends, here's to all of those beasties
because wherever and whenever they came at us, we prevailed,
and they did not stop us reaching this moment.
So we made it.
We're here.
Our paths in graduate education have reached their destination.
What should we make of that?
Well, we can start by asking ourselves
what parts of our journey we're most thankful for right now.
I am especially grateful for three things.
First, fellowship and community.
We each made it through the graduate school journey
with the camaraderie and support that we gave one another.
Fellowship like nothing but shared endurance can create.
In study groups, peer mentoring, student community meetings,
and, of course, just pure good fun.
At GSC socials, board game nights, Pawsox games,
and at the GCB.
Many times.
I am thankful, personally, for the friends I gained
and the ways that I grew during my service
on the Graduate Student Council advocating for graduate student
concerns across the University.
This, and everyone I worked with,
nurtured my confidence and my determination
to push through institutional change.
Second, I'm grateful for an expanding consciousness
of privilege and inequity.
It's pretty clear now, to all of us,
that Brown, like other institutions,
has work to do to live up to its best ideals
and achieve a more inclusive environment for all.
This is a dynamic place due in no small part
to the dynamic and dedicated people among us
who challenge all of us to think critically about what we do
and how we do it.
I, personally, have learned from so many who
have raised and highlighted the experience
of underprivileged and marginalized Brunonians.
They, and some of my fellow scholars,
have taught me more than I ever knew
I needed to know about power, privilege, race, gender,
and class in the United States and beyond.
About the importance of really seeing and hearing others,
and of learning to be a better ally.
Learning which is my responsibility,
our responsibility, not theirs.
I'm also a scholar of democratic citizenship,
and my work would be poorer if it
not for their example and insight.
Third, I will be forever grateful for the privilege
of learning to teach here.
Brown is where in uncovered my vocation
and ignited my passion for education.
I had never thought of myself as a teacher,
so when our bright, motivated, and curious undergrads
uncovered me as one it was to more than a little
surprise on my part.
Their questions have deepened my knowledge and understanding.
They have challenged me to explain better, advise better,
and occasionally to speak slower.
[LAUGHTER]
Many have taught me things about myself,
not least, the first gen students of Brown
to whose example, inspiration, and generosity
I owe more than I could ever say.
I will treasure my adventures on College Hill
as a teacher in training for the rest of my days.
So what do I make of that?
Fellow, Doctors, as we prepare to leave this special place,
we have a responsibility to think about our experience
and about how the paths we forged
will now become part of the ground
onto which others will venture after us.
In light of this, I ask you today
to consider making two commitments.
First, learn from the worst and the best of your journey
through graduate school.
Take the worst, the saddest, the most frustrating,
and the least helpful.
Acknowledge it, and heed its lessons.
Share the learning and the struggle, not the darkness.
Take the best, the most inspiring,
the most motivating moments, those moments when you
felt the pulse of your agency.
Treasure and build from it.
Share the greatness of your journey of inquiry.
Be frank about the obstacles.
But give due respect to the passion
which drove us and will drive others to tackle them
and to reach the stage.
Second, be the best of your mentors.
I hope all of us have known mentorship at its best,
whether in our formal advisors in the amazing Brown faculty
or in other confidence.
We should look to these for our example.
Be that person, that leader, that boss,
that adviser who finds their charges a shortcut to clarity
and progress, who knows where the potholes are
and will share enough of their own experience
to point them out.
Now I'm not saying here that we should work
to eliminate struggle entirely.
That would be absurd.
Struggle can be productive, revelatory even.
The pursuit of knowledge is, after all, a crucible,
and it ought to be.
But a crucible is for refining ideas,
for burning away conjecture and speculation.
It is not for burning away people's spirit or their hope.
There will always be rites of passage in this,
as in other professions, but we must
avoid treating those rites we have undergone as fixed
and nearly reproducing them.
We know better than that.
Rigor is not the enemy of compassion.
And we should avoid making it so in our practice,
in are debates, and in a leadership.
This is true of tomorrow's faculty, deans,
and researchers, and it's consultants,
industrial scientists, and museum curators.
We will all find ourselves guiding the experiences,
learning, and growth of others.
So it's incumbent upon us to be intentional in driving change
and supporting those who come after us, especially
when they don't look like us and have lived lives very different
from ours.
For now though, today, we must celebrate
this moment and the people who've aided us in reaching it.
On behalf of the graduates gathered here,
I offer our appreciation for the advisers,
mentors, and friends, and our faculty and staff
who've accompanied us and guided us along this journey.
To our friends, family, and loved ones,
we offer thanks for the blessings
we found in your boundless love, encouragement,
and faith, and the occasional reality check.
We forged our own paths with all of you.
And though the journey may been solitary, painfully so
a times, we were never alone.
Lastly, I thank you, my friends and colleagues,
for the immense privilege of having learned and grown
in your country.
Enjoy this special day.
You've earned it.
I wish you fair skies and interesting journeys.
Congratulations and good luck.
[APPLAUSE]