Commencement Magazine 2017

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Jason Klein ’00 gives back & pays it forward AS YOU LAUNCH INTO

THE FUTURE

Jason has served as a long-time Brown volunteer and has donated each year since he graduated.

He earmarked money for Brown in his first will, drafted at age 24 when he started his first business. “It wasn’t all that impressive, but it was something that I wanted to make a part of my giving,” Jason says.

“As I’ve gotten older and created an income for myself, I’ve continued to make Brown a larger part of my philanthropy. Hopefully I can be a reminder that even when life is just ramping up, it’s never too early to think about where and how you can give and plan your estate.”

DON’T FORGET TO

LOOK BACK

You can follow in Jason’s footsteps and support future Brown students with an estate gift— no matter what stage of life you’re in. Contact The Office of Planned Giving at 401-863-9119 or Planned_Giving@brown.edu today to discuss your options.

Congrats Class of 2017!

Best wishes from Brown’s Office of Planned Giving

Planned_Giving_ad.indd 1

5/8/17 9:12 AM

MAY 26-28, 2017 COMMENCEMENT MAGAZINE

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enior Week and Commencement provide the perfect opportunity to tie a bow around our time at Brown. We return to the first-year units from whence we came; we get our last chance to dance with someone we always liked; we eat our last meal at the Ratty; we line up to walk back through the gates we were awed by when we first arrived on campus. This magazine itself is an effort to identify the contours of different narratives for our time at Brown, to pick out the most salient and meaningful parts and string them together into something we can point to and say, “That was my time at Brown.”

In an attempt to put borders around the Brown experience, this magazine includes 11 columns by our fellow classmates, all trying to give shape and definition to their individual stories.

The columns span in style, form and topic, with one aiming to analyze the worth of our education, some charting the trajectory of their authors’ paths at Brown through music or meals, one interrogating Brown’s reputation as the “chill” Ivy and one chronicling the semi-fictional story of an international, low-income, first-generation queer student at Brown.

Similarly, the topics for this magazine’s features touch on some of the most defining experiences and themes of the last four years. One of our features examines the most recent presidential election and its impact on students. Another looks into how Providence and its relationship with the University have shaped students’ experiences over the last few years. A third feature looks into this very community in an attempt to understand the experiences, values and common ground that undergird it.

Despite all of this, the truth is that our time at Brown might go undefined. Maybe the arcs that are established here do not fit your time at Brown, or maybe they do not adequately explore and explain the specificity of your circumstances or maybe you did not find meaning where you thought you might.

Maybe it is best to let your time at Brown go unanalyzed and untamed. Either way, we hope this magazine rings some bells in relation to your experiences, or at least helps you answer the question: “How did my experience at Brown stack up?”

See you at the Van Wickle Gates.

Commencement 4

Schedule of major events

5

Senior orators

6

Honorary degree recipients

Features 11

Bursting the bubble How Providence shapes the Brown experience

13

In the wake of November 8 How the election shook a campus to its core

16

Trying togetherness Redefining community for a diverse and digital Brown

The year in photos

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Voices of 2017

23

Senior survey

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— The 126th Editorial Board

editors

design

writers

p h oto

graphics

Emma Jerzyk Joseph Zappa Andrew Flax Caroline Kelly

Sonia Geba Jessica Yu

Kyle Borowski Shira Buchsbaum Mia Pattillo Madison Rivlin

Eli White Sam Berube Huayu Ouyang Naomy Pedroza Shoshana Simons

Laura Felenstein

Cover photo by Lilly Nguyen

CO M M E N C E M E N T 2 0 1 7 SCHEDULE OF MAJOR EVENTS Fr i d ay, M ay 2 6 9:00 p.m. – 1:00 a.m.

Campus Dance, sponsored by the Brown Alumni Association.

Main Green, Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle

S a t u r d ay, M ay 2 7 9:00 a.m.

Commencement Forums A series of academic colloquia with faculty, alums and distinguished guests.

Various locations 1:30 p.m.

Baccalaureate Procession Line-up Graduates assemble on Waterman Street, facing east toward Thayer Street, with the line beginning at Faunce Arch, wearing caps and gowns.

Waterman Street 2:30 p.m.

Baccalaureate Service A multi-faith service featuring music, dance, spiritual readings and a speech

by Daveed Diggs ’04, honorary degree recipient and winner of Tony and Grammy awards for roles in “Hamilton.”

The First Baptist Church in America 4:00 p.m.

Brown Daily Herald Alumni Reunion 195 Angell St.

S u n d ay, M ay 2 8 9:45 a.m.

Commencement Procession Waterman Street, north of Faunce Arch 10:15 a.m. (estimated) Graduate School Ceremonies Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle (Doctoral) Pembroke Field (Master’s) 10:15 a.m. (estimated) Medical School Ceremony First Unitarian Church of Providence 12:15 p.m. (estimated) College Ceremony Live simulcast to the Main Green, Salomon Center and Sayles Hall.

The First Baptist Church in America 1:15 p.m. (estimated) University Ceremony Senior orations and awarding of honorary degrees.

Main Green 2:30 p.m. (estimated) Diploma Ceremonies for each department at assigned locations, as listed in the Commencement program.

In the event of severe storm conditions, the Baccalaureate and Commencement processions will be canceled and storm plans will go into effect. A message will be posted on the Brown website and sent via text message to all seniors. The Van Wickle Gates will remain open until 6 p.m. on Monday, May 29.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

S E N I O R O R ATO R S Adriel Barrios-Anderson and Viet Nguyen Adriel Barrios-Anderson ’17 and Viet Nguyen ’17 will deliver speeches at the University’s 249th Commencement ceremony May 28. The two were selected by a committee of staff and faculty members as well as fellow students. This weekend they will take their place in a Brunonian tradition that elevates the voices of two student speakers instead of leveraging Brown’s prestige to solicit oratory from politicians, entrepreneurs and celebrities.

In conversation, both Barrios-Anderson and Nguyen are gentle and measured speakers. They reflect on their experiences with poise and humility, a trait they identified in separate interviews as a distinctive feature of Brown students, whom they praise as high achievers driven more by passion than prestige.

Barrios-Anderson grew up in Houston, Texas. The son of Panamanian immigrants, he attended a Montessori school and has wanted to be a scientist since the age of four. He studied neuroscience as well as science and society as an undergraduate and will start his four years at Brown’s Alpert Medical School in the fall, having been admitted four years ago to the Program in Liberal Medical Education.

“I love the program,” Barrios-Anderson said of PLME, which offers a select number of prospective undergraduates admission into both the College and the Med School when they apply as high school students. “It’s been a fantastic opportunity to prepare for med school while exploring other interests.”

For Barrios-Anderson, those other interests have centered on the way medical science functions in the world. In addition to standard pre-medical courses and neuroscience requirements, Barrios-Anderson said his concentration in science and society “opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about science.” Courses and activities focused not just on chemical or biological processes but also on the social element of medicine have instilled in him appreciation for the fact that “medical care can be very messy and very emotional.”

Nguyen hails from Mountain View, California. His parents immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1993, and he was born in San Jose two years later. He attended a “medium-sized” high school where he fondly remembers “teachers (taking) extra time to make sure (he) was caught up and was ready for the curriculum at Brown.”

Nguyen considered concentrations as disparate as public health, computer science and physics before settling on education as a course of study. He was taking a neuroscience class on learning and memory when he realized his burning question was: “How do we make people better learners?” Rather than concentrating on the biological process of learning, he wanted to tackle the issue by “looking at it from systemic levels.”

When asked about his transition to Brown, Nguyen laughed and smiled.

“It was a lot of adjusting in terms of the social climate and the financial aspect of it,” he said. He was struck by the cost of moving and all the logistics that came with it. For the first two months, his “dorm room was basically empty.

I just had a pillow and some soap.” Like many other classmates from the West Coast, Nguyen was also arriving at a new residence 3,000 miles from home having never been away from home for much longer than a week.

Nguyen would go on to blend his coursework with an intense commitment to extracurricular activities on campus, serving as president of the

Undergraduate Council of Students in his senior year and founding 1vyG, an organization at a number of institutions of higher education that advocates the interests of first-generation college students.

Nguyen’s work as an advocate for firstgeneration college students would, along with buy-in from the University and the advocacy of other students on campus, lead to the founding of the University’s First-Generation and Low-Income Student Center. His efforts to advance social change at Brown have shaped his education and his career plans.

“I see my role as UCS president as an extension of my studies,” Nguyen said, noting that he is interested in “looking at higher education as a system, and how do we change it, not just from a theoretical standpoint but also from an activist standpoint.” After graduation, Nguyen will head to South Korea to teach on a Fulbright scholarship.

Following his stint in South Korea he will return to the New England area to work for the nonprofit consulting firm Bridgespan in Boston.

On campus, Barrios-Anderson served as a coordinator for the New Scientist Collective, a group that provides guidance through peer mentorship for underrepresented minorities navigating coursework in science, technology, mathematics and engineering. Barrios-Anderson has found professors in the neuroscience department very encouraging, but he knows that positive experiences in the classroom and with faculty members are “not the reality for everyone.” As a mentor, he tries “to support students in finding the professors and connections and avenues that will make their experiences in STEM more welcoming.”

Barrios-Anderson is also a musician who plays in a group called the 5Y Quintet. His memories with the group “are probably the moments I will most cherish about my Brown experience,” he said.

In fact, it was a remark made to Barrios-Anderson by a professor of music that became the conceptual engine for the speech he will give at Commencement. Tentatively titled “Silent Lessons,” the speech harkens back to a moment his freshman year when a professor explained that music’s enchantment owes itself in part to “silences that are being manipulated by composers.”

“I felt at Brown I learned a lot by attending to this idea of silence,” BarriosAnderson said. In his speech, he aims “to attend to things that we normally don’t attend to because we think there’s not much there.”

In Nguyen’s speech, tentatively titled, “The Idea of Deserving,” he will focus on the challenge of “reconciling different identities … while also being in a very elite institution.” He will reflect on how the idea of deserving differs from that of entitlement and how four years at Brown shaped his evolving understanding of these categories.

Drawing on four years at Brown, Nguyen said he would tell future students, “You’ll have the best moments of your life, and you’ll have some not-so-great moments.” The key is “looking at those things as a collective experience” and considering “how they’ll shape you into the person you want to become.”

Thinking about future Brown students, Barrios-Anderson emphasized the importance of “being receptive to how you’re experiencing Brown and how your peers and friends are … because that’s how you create and foster a more supportive community.”

COMMENCEMENT 2017

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H O N O R A RY D E G R E E Each year during Commencement, the University bestows honorary degrees on a group of professionals who are outstanding in their fields. This year’s diverse selection of six candidates includes two award-winning actors, the chief executive officer of PepsiCo and a poet. The six recipients — Robert De Niro, Daveed Diggs ’04, Donald Hood MS’68 PhD’70, Indra Nooyi, Richard Parsons and Rosmarie Waldrop ­­— will receive their honorary degrees during Commencement May 28.

Diggs will deliver the Baccalaureate address to the class of 2017 May 27.

By Mia Pattillo

Robert De Niro

De Niro is an Italian-American actor well-known for his wide range of performances in films such as “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas,” “Raging Bull,” “Awakenings” and “Silver Linings Playbook.” He has won Academy Awards for his roles in “The Godfather Part II” and “Raging Bull” and has been nominated for numerous other awards. De Niro will receive a Doctor of Fine Arts for his cinematic work.

Daveed Diggs ’04

Diggs, who graduated from Brown with a degree in theater, arts and performance studies, will be receiving a Doctor of Fine Arts to celebrate his many accomplishments, which include a Tony award and Grammy award for his performance as both Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in the Broadway hit, “Hamilton.” An actor, rapper and writer, Diggs is the vocalist of the hip-hop and rap group “clipping.,” as well as a member of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail’s freestyle rap group.

Donald Hood MS’68 PhD’70 Hood has been a faculty member at Columbia since 1969, teaching courses on the brain and behavior. He has published over 300 works that focus on the biology of vision. At Columbia, he is the James F. Bender Professor of Psychology and was vice president for the arts and sciences at Columbia from 1982 to 1987. At Brown, he has served as secretary of the Corporation. He will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

R E C I PI E N TS O F 2017 Indra Nooyi

Nooyi is the current chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo and has been consistently ranked among Forbes’ “100 Most Powerful Women.” Nooyi was elected chairwoman of the U.S.-India Business Council in 2008 and currently leads its board of directors, which includes more than 60 senior executives. She will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Richard Parsons

Parsons will also receive a Doctor of Humane Letters. Having previously served as chairman of Citigroup and chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Inc., he is currently senior advisor at Providence Equity Partners. Parsons is chairman of Jazz Foundation of America, a board member of Teach for America and was appointed Board Chair of The Rockefeller Foundation in June 2016.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Waldrop is a German poet, translator and publisher who has written 17 books of poetry, two novels and three books of criticism. She received her master’s and PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan and then went on to teach at Wesleyan University. She has taught at Brown as a visiting professor and resided in Providence for nearly 60 years. She will be receiving a Doctor of Letters for her literary work.

Photos courtesy of Brown University.

COMMENCEMENT 2017

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Congratulations Payton Smith on all your achievements at Brown University!

An Honors Thesis, setting new Athletic records, but most importantly, personal growth and life-long friendships!

We are so very proud of you!

Love you more, Dad, Mom, Reagan and Molly

Congratulations to Our Incoming Analysts David Cohen Technology

Christa Ruggiero Wealth Management

Yuqiao Wang Global Capital Markets

Nikhil Patel Investment Banking

Stephen Skubina Global Capital Markets

Zackary Zapolsky Global Capital Markets

Morgan Stanley’s mission is to build a community of talented, innovative thinkers who can ®¯½³±¸ «¸® ®¯º¶¹Ã ½¾«¾¯ʙ¹°ʙ¾²¯ʙ«¼¾ Ǥ¸«¸­³«¶ º¼¹®¿­¾½ «¸® ½¯¼À³­¯½ ¾¹ ¹¿¼ ­¶³¯¸¾½ «­¼¹½½ ¾²¯ ±¶¹¬¯ʧ Our employees come from a variety of backgrounds and interests — all are high achievers who ®¯·¹¸½¾¼«¾¯ ³¸¾¯±¼³¾Ãʦ ³¸¾¯¶¶¯­¾¿«¶ ­¿¼³¹½³¾Ã «¸® ¾²¯ ®¯½³¼¯ ¾¹ Á¹¼µ ³¸ « ­¹¶¶¯±³«¶ «¾·¹½º²¯¼¯ʧ ¯ give employees responsibility early, so they can quickly make an impact on our business and the Á¹¼¶® «¾ ¶«¼±¯ʧ ʽ ȱȯȰȶ ¹¼±«¸͖ ¾«¸¶¯Ã

My Dear Princess Shavon Bell,

The Brown Daily Herald congratulates the Class of 2017!

With your regal crown, feather boa and Teddy you will continue to soar!

Always remember to use your gifts to make life better for others!

Hugs and kisses and congratulations!

Mom

Congratulations Anica!

We love you and are very proud of you!

Mom, Dad, Zack and Family

Congratulations To

Andrew Flax ‘17 and the 126th Editorial Board Mom, Dad Caroline and Ellen

DREAM BELIEVE SUCCEED Congratulations Arielle!

We are so proud of you!

Always follow your dream You are a star!

Computer Computer Science

Science

Love, Mom, Dad, Ashley and Debby

Taneil

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Commencement Forum The Impact of Social Media on Politics, Culture, and Scholarly Communication Social media and other rapidly-evolving digital technologies have changed the way we communicate in all realms of our lives. This panel discussion will focus on the impact of social media on political, cultural, and scholarly communication.

panelists: David Corn ’81, p’21, American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones Alissa Quart ’94, Executive Editor of Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of Branded, Republic of Outsiders, and other books that mix reportage and cultural theory Elias Muhanna, Brown University Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and contributing writer to The New Yorker online

Saturday, May 27, 2017 • 12:30 PM List Art Auditorium (Room 120) 64 College Street, Providence, RI 02912 Share your Commencement & Reunion Weekend with

#Brown2017

BROWN’S NEWEST ONLINE LEARNING EXPERIENCE With courses topics ranging from the intersection of art and medicine, to mass surveillance, to the ethics of memory, Brown University has launched an online learning initiative to bring its distinctive approach to teaching and learning to new audiences across the globe.

Learn more about the BrownX experience.

brown.edu/brownx

Bursting the bubble

How Providence shapes the Brown experience

By Madison Rivlin

COURTESY OF MATTEO MOBILIO

Charles Saylor ’17 coached the co-ed varsity wrestling team at Esek Hopkins Middle School through Beat the Streets. He called it a “dream job.”

T

rue to the freethinking and amorphous spirit that distinguishes Brown’s academic atmosphere from others, no two Brown experiences are the same. Notwithstanding certain staple occurrences, such as navigating the vibrant Main Green on the way to class, making the initial acquaintance of roommates and neighbors and watching the vermillion Providence sunset blend into a navy sky, Brown students’ approaches to their four years here diverge in how they choose to interact not only with Brown but also with the Providence community. Grappling with the limitations and virtues of the Brown bubble, those who choose to venture past the Van Wickle Gates and off College Hill gain context and enrich their time in Providence.

The bubble

Superficially a product of geographic isolation, the Brown bubble begins to take shape for each class as students new to Providence hesitate to get off the Hill, said Lydia Chim ’17,

community outreach officer for the Senior Class Board. More daring first-years wander to the seemingly distant hubs of Wickenden Street and Wayland Square, attend WaterFire and patronize restaurants, Chim added, but most stay on campus with little need to leave.

“Freshman year, my friends and I didn’t get out of the bubble much,” said Henry Richardson ’17. “It was easier to stay on College Hill — friends were here, food was here and no one had access to a car. Brown was new and exciting.”

“I really needed to feel ready as a student at Brown … before I was ready to go out and invest myself in other places,” said Charles Saylor ’17.

Instead of going off the Hill, many students frequent Thayer Street, which offers a variety of small businesses and local restaurants right off campus.

“As a freshman, you already had everything you needed right here,” said Admas Belay ’17.

After freshman year, Providence’s gastronomic tradition, enriched by the culinary expertise

of Johnson and Wales University, becomes more accessible for those who go off meal plan, said Isabel van Paaschen ’17.

Students who live at Brown over the summer are particularly likely to engage with the local culinary scene, said Patrick Zhang ’17. “Not being caught up in the rush of the semester allows you to take the time to explore Providence much more,” Zhang said, citing Providence’s summer food truck festivals as a top local attraction.

As their time in Providence progresses, students wisen up to local deals offered by Providence businesses such as Rhode Island Food Fights, Restaurant Week and Federal Hill specials, said Belay and Richardson.

“By the time you are a senior, you start to feel more nostalgic knowing that you’re going to be leaving Brown and Providence so soon,” Chim said. “It makes me sad to think that I’m going to be leaving Brown, that I won’t know what the

Continued on page 12 COMMENCEMENT 2017

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Continued from page 11 popular restaurants and bars here are. Knowing that time is running out encourages me and other upperclassmen to do more and explore more.”

Class Board has made a concerted effort to get more students to engage with local institutions through sponsored “senior nights,” Chim said. “Sponsoring a night with great deals at a bar or restaurant is a great way to reintroduce or introduce a Providence business that doesn’t typically interact with Brown students to the community.”

Extracurricular organizations run by students also push back against the Brown bubble by connecting students with local merchants.

As a sophomore, van Paaschen signed up for the student-run Brown Market Shares Program, which “connect(s) the Brown community with regional producers through affordable weekly shares of fresh, local and sustainable produce, bread, eggs, dairy and meat,” according to its website.

“Because you are receiving what’s in season, you have to get creative and know what is local to the area,” van Paaschen said, mentioning how one particularly harsh winter for New England farmers influenced the produce she received and made her more cognizant of her relationship to local communities.

policy to the test.

“Working for local government has made me more aware of the fabric of the city and how people are working so hard to better the quality of life here,” said Rowland, who interned at City Hall for Brett Smiley, now chief of staff for Governor Gina Raimondo.

Working with Smiley, Rowland helped to “reevaluate the tangible tax in Providence (by) assessing alternatives that other cities employ,” Rowland said. “I knew I wanted to know more about municipal finance and work on the local

An education in the city

Some students venture beyond Brown to synthesize real-world experiences with curricular learning. Though she had been to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum many times before, Charlotte Tisch ’17 first met conservator Ingrid Neuman while there with a class, AMST 1510: “Museum Collections and Collecting.”

“I was so inspired by Neuman’s work,” Tisch said. “Studying archaeology, the visit opened up a whole new world for me. I reached out to her to learn more about what she does. … I’ve been working there ever since.”

As an intern at the museum, Tisch has been involved in many local projects, including visiting graveyards and tracing ancestries to discover the identity of Kenneth Sully, whose likeness is captured in a plaster bust that was featured at the Providence Art Club’s “Making Her Mark” exhibition. With another class, ARCH 1900: “The Archaeology of College Hill,” Tisch has further contextualized her Brown experience within the history of Providence. She studied the history of Providence whaling and wrote a history of her current home on Angell Street.

“Providence has such a rich history,” Tisch said. “In the grand scheme of everything that has happened in this city, our experience is so small, but we get to share in its legacy.”

Lainie Rowland ’17, a former Herald opinions editor, got off the Hill to put her studies in public

12 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE TISCH

Charlotte Tisch ’17 interned at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

level — you can’t take a class on how city hall works.”

“The project was very hands-on,” Rowland said. “You don’t really get to do that so much in your classes, and it gave me a different perspective coming back to the classroom.”

Local relationships

Through their engagement with Providence, students develop bonds with people in the local community.

Saylor highlighted his experience working as head coach for the co-ed varsity wrestling team at Esek Hopkins Middle School through the Beat the Streets program.

“It’s quite the dream job,” said Saylor, who has held the position since 2015. “The school had no varsity-level sports until Beat the Streets

came along. Now the wrestling team has 40 kids wrestling.”

Saylor has seen his wrestlers graduate and go on to wrestle in high school. “I’ll always have something in Providence that isn’t related at all to Brown.”

Dayton Williams ’17 met Providence residents through his work as a community center language instructor.

Having experienced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina first-hand, Williams said, “Service has always been a large part of who I am.” Diving into teaching English as a second language, Williams developed a curriculum with a co-teacher tailored to the needs of adult first-generation Americans, helping his students pass their driver’s tests and perform effectively in interviews.

“Teaching is reciprocal,” Williams said. “It’s incredibly meaningful to share the experience with people 40 years your senior who just got to the United States and are looking to overcome structural barriers to their advancement.”

Williams has also worked as a financial fellow at the Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit microfinance firm “geared towards providing financial literacy programming and low-interest loans,” Williams said. “I created relationships like I did teaching English, but these are more personal because you’re dealing with personal finance and personal information.”

Interacting with Providence residents unaffiliated with Brown provides context for the privilege involved in attending an Ivy League university.

“Most of us at Brown take for granted the financial comfort we have,” Williams said. “Most of us don’t have to work two jobs or have children to take care of or debts that seem insurmountable.”

As intake interns working for the Rhode Island Public Defender’s office at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston, Ariadne Ellsworth ’17 and Sydney Calas ’17 interviewed recently arrested citizens who cannot afford a lawyer.

“Working in the criminal justice system is one of the best ways to get a pulse on the community,” Ellsworth said. “You are seeing underserved communities and the way elite lawyers and judges interact with members of that community.”

For Ellsworth and Calas, work in Providence put the Brown experience in a different light.

“Transitions between college life and the internship were the hardest,” Calas said. “Every day I would walk down the Hill to work, and at the end of the day I would walk up the Hill and leave that whole world behind.”

“In our Brown bubble, you imagine that the University is so central to Providence life,” Ellsworth said. “But you go out into the community and realize that it’s not necessarily relevant at all.”

In the wake of November 8 How the election shook a campus to its core

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lection Day started quietly on College Hill, and with the New York Times Upshot Election tracker giving Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning, few if any students felt the need to worry.

A Hillary Clinton cutout stood on the Main Green, and a steady trickle of students stopped to take photos with the next presumptive and first female president of the United States. Any mention of Donald Trump was met with laughter or an exaggerated grimace.

Few saw his rise coming, and even though his ability to dispense with a primary field of 16 other Republican candidates had been alarming, he just did not have a feasible path to the presidency, it seemed. That would be impossible.

Natalie Mesa ’19 thought as much while walking down Hope Street that afternoon when a truck slowed down behind her. “Trump! Trump!

Trump!” the men inside yelled. The truck slowed to a crawl, tailing Mesa as the men shouted obscenities and racial slurs, telling her to go back to Mexico. She is not Mexican. After nearly two blocks of being taunted, Mesa ran behind a dumpster and hid until her pursuers drove off. The incident was jarring — even traumatic — but it did not change her mind as to the supposed inevitability of a Hillary Clinton electoral victory.

That was the perceived assumption — at least at an election watch party hosted by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs the evening of Nov. 8. In stark contrast to the divisiveness of the recent election season, the atmosphere at the Watson event would best be described as jovial. Cupcakes sporting the insignias of the Democratic and Republican parties were devoured as people posed with props at a photo station.

Watson faculty members mingled with students in front of screens broadcasting live returns, unaware of the shift the party would soon take.

Unease started creeping in at 9 p.m., as returns from swing states started coming in off the predicted mark. By 11 o’clock, despair had settled across most of campus. Only a few were still celebrating, welcoming the surprise victory of Donald Trump against the stark contrast of the gloom around them.

In a confrontation with Trump supporters in response to their unadulterated elation, Paula Martínez ’17 mentioned that she was Mexican to contextualize her sentiments.

“Ew,” a student said in response. Chalking the incident up to miscommunication, the Trump supporter said he had actually said “oh,” but was

misheard.

The Trump presidency to which many once referred in jest is now reality, and the torrent of emotions and implications that came with it show no signs of leaving College Hill.

Like many other Americans, Brown students have had to grapple with what had previously been deemed a political impossibility. But they have also had to wrestle, now more than ever, with the realization that the “Brown bubble” is far more expansive, exclusionary and blinding than most had originally thought. Since the election, students of all political stripes have had and continue to reassess and restructure their relationships to campus communities, the city of Providence and the American political process at large.

The campus reacts, the centers respond

Most students processed the fallout of the election in group settings, finding support in community spaces and departments on campus.

In defined community spaces like the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, the LGBTQ Center and the Brown Center for Students of Color, students worked through emotions at their rawest in “Community Care” events. In a model crafted by the BCSC, faculty and staff members offer both supportive distraction — music, food, arts and crafts — and serious engagement with issues students face as they arise.

“We did a lot of talking with … students whose families were divided and were feeling a lack of support at home,” said Director of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center Gail Cohee, who said that the student need for election-related support has lasted through the spring semester. “We hear things about students being harassed on the street, concerns about access to reproductive healthcare,” Cohee added.

Students were not the only ones grappling with difficult circumstances. “It can be easy to forget that a lot of people that serve as support for students often hold identities that are also impacted by what’s happening,” said Je-Shawna Wholley, program coordinator for the LGBTQ Center.

“I remember walking into the (BCSC) and running into some of my colleagues” after the election, Wholley said. “We just embraced each other and started crying. That was the first moment where we gave ourselves permission to say, ‘We need care, too; this is also very scary for all of us for the same reasons it’s scary for our students.’”

For faculty and staff members, striking a balance between modeling vulnerability and strength

By Kyle Borowski can be difficult, Wholley added, as supporting students often comes at the cost of compartmentalizing their own emotions.

“People will say terrible things about all of our identities at various points,” Cohee said. “But after the years we’ve learned to check in with each other, check in with other colleagues.”

Beyond just checking in, organizations within the University community have mobilized to respond to students’ emotional and logistical needs. In many cases, this involves staff members at Brown’s various centers and departments connecting students to specific resources.

At Sarah Doyle, for example, students concerned about changes to Planned Parenthood funding or laws concerning reproductive health were connected to BWell Health Promotion for consultation about their options, said Felicia Salinas-Moniz, visiting professor of American studies and assistant director of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. At the suggestion of graduate students, Sarah Doyle also hosted an event in collaboration with BWell to analyze the implications of the election regarding access to reproductive healthcare.

At the LGBTQ Center Community Care event held days after the election, two staff members for the Office of Residential Life experienced in working with undocumented students and those qualifying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals were present to meet with students affected by potential immigration policy changes, Wholley said. When the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education retracted Obama-era guidance on the inclusion of transgender discrimination under Title IX, LGBTQ Center Program Director Kelly Garrett released a statement maintaining the importance of trans students on campus and their right to use whichever bathrooms align with their gender identities.

When members of the class, MES 1999E: “Displacement and Refugees in the Middle East,” went on a trip to Amman, Jordan for spring recess, the Watson Center for Information Technology loaned laptops to some members of the trip due to concerns over possible searches of personal electronics in the wake of Trump’s Muslim ban and subsequent restrictions on air travel. While most of the trip went smoothly, all 12 students and the professor were randomly chosen for an extended security check and were told to charge their electronic devices to allow for possible phone checks.

Continued on page 14 COMMENCEMENT 2017

13

Continued from page 13 Many centers and departments on campus also responded to the election with panels and forums, hosting experts to analyze aspects of the election or its implications on future policy as it related to their fields of expertise. The Middle East studies department held a teach-in on the implications of Trump’s Muslim ban, while the environmental studies department held a panel on environmentalism under the new administration.

More than anything else, the panels and events served to answer the questions of a confused and shaken community unsure of how to move forward following the results of the election. “Emotions were so high, and one of the very first safe spaces for some of these students was to come to the Urban Environmental Lab,” said Dawn King, director of undergraduate studies at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

In the days and weeks following the election, students concerned about environmental issues congregated in the UEL to discuss the impact of the election in frank terms and rely on the community that naturally resides there, King added.

“Students feel, rightfully so, that this building is their own, that this is a home for them.”

Red elephants in the room, blue donkeys on the move

“Trump’s character is antithetical to the standards of common decency. From outright racist comments about a federal judge early in his campaign to his utterly unconscionable brags about sexually assaulting women, Trump has continually shown that he is unfit to lead the nation.”

That statement reads like it could have been written by any number of liberal sources on Brown’s campus, but one would likely not assume that it came from the Brown College Republican board members who drafted it. Citing Trump’s paucity of support among Republicans on campus — only about a third of the club supported endorsing him, and no students, to the knowledge of club president Ethan Shire ’19, were involved with the national campaign — the group published an op-ed in The Herald in October explaining why it would not be endorsing the Republican presidential candidate.

The group’s decision not to support its party’s nominee echoed the difficulty many Republicans faced in deciding whether or not to support Trump throughout the campaign. The Brown chapter’s rejection followed similar statements from Republican student organizations at Princeton and Harvard. At Yale, frustration over Trump caused a rift in the school’s College Republican chapter that led a portion of the club — including the majority of its leadership — to secede and form the Yale New Republicans, which refused to endorse Trump.

In light of such divisions, deciding how exactly

14 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

HUAYU OUYANG / HERALD

Students took part in a demonstration in the fall to voice support for progressive values threatened by the then-incoming presidential administration of Donald Trump.

to handle Trump’s unexpected victory has put Brown College Republican board members in a sticky situation. “We wanted to create an avenue for people to celebrate when there was no other avenue for that,” Shire said. On the other hand, “I’m not a Trump supporter, (and) I was not enthused election night whatsoever,” he added.

“Generally, (we’re) proceeding in much the same manner that we have been for the last eight years,” said Austin Rose ’19, former treasurer of the Brown College Republicans. “There’s an executive that we don’t really like, and people below him that are politicians (and) disappoint you at every turn.”

Though many Republicans on campus were nearly as shocked and worried by the result of the election as their more liberal classmates, few found spaces of student grief and support accessible. “It’s not like prior to the election, Brown was such a welcoming place for conservative voices,” Shire said, adding that he and many Republicans have only felt more alienated from the community since the election.

“We’re treated like a monolith,” Rose said, adding that this generalized view of Republicans had been similarly leveraged against Trump voters throughout the election. Because Republicans and specifically Trump supporters are so stigmatized on campus, Rose said, there is little opportunity for learning on either side of the political spectrum.

“When you give people who disagree with you — and they may be 100 percent wrong — no feeling of enfranchisement in political discourse on campus, then they’re never going to talk to others,” Rose said. “They’re never going to break out of their bubble.”

A bubble of different sorts burst on Nov. 8, as Democrats and Clinton supporters heavily invested in the election began to grapple with a surprise result.

By 11 p.m. on election night, the watch party organized by the Brown Democrats and Brown Students for Hillary in the Friedman Auditorium

in the Metcalf Research Building appeared a great deal different than when excited and optimistic supporters gathered to watch the first returns come in. “The mood was really low,” said Brian Cohn, president of the Brown Democrats. “People were shocked and sad. Some were crying; some were stupefied.”

“We were trying to let people know that it’s going to be okay, (that they) put in a lot of work, and that counts for something,” Cohn said. “But it was trying to put a positive spin on a very dark place.”

Having spent months campaigning — canvassing in New Hampshire and organizing phone banks — the biggest question for many Brown Democrats was where to go next. Besides just dealing with the stress and emotion of election night, Brown Democrats had to begin forging a new identity as the opposition. After eight years of Obama, even seniors had no experience working against a sitting president.

At a town hall meeting held the week after the election, the Brown Democrats set out to do just that. “We had huge attendance for that first meeting,” Cohn said, noting that the crowd took up two rooms of Wilson Hall. In breakout sessions and a larger discussion, students compiled a list of what they wanted from the Brown Democrats, formulating their vision for the group.

“Activism, education in politics and policy (and) a space for marginalized peoples” were among the top issues students wanted to address, Cohn said. In addition, many expressed a desire to involve themselves more actively in state and local issues, something the Brown Democrats had focused on less in the past.

“Brown (Democrats) have been really good at being a space for people to talk about policy, politics and the Democratic Party,” Cohn said, adding that the group has been able to invite interesting speakers and host relevant policy discussions. “But we hadn’t done a lot of activism.

The last time the Brown (Democrats) got really involved in anything locally was for marriage equality in 2012,” he said, referring to scattered

phone banks for specific issues. “But nothing on any meaningful scale.”

Students take action

Days after the signing of Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and indefinitely halting the arrival of Syrian refugees, the American Civil Liberties Union reported something unexpected. Donations to ACLU chapters around the country were surging in the wake of an order many saw as xenophobic and, pertinently, illegal.

In only two days, contributions to the historic legal advocacy organization topped $24 million — a considerable bump from the $3.5 million in online contributions raised across the whole of 2015. ACLU membership ballooned as well, with nearly 200,000 new registrants joining in the same two-day period.

This trend surfaced in Brown’s student-run chapter as well. “We went from about 15 to 20 people regularly to I think 60 at our first meeting the week after election night,” said Abel Girma ’18, former president of the Brown ACLU. For the first time in recent memory, most of the club’s supporters are card-holding members of the ACLU — a commitment that stipulates an annual due of about $35, he added. Since the election, the Rhode Island ACLU has made note of an increase in donations specifically from Brown students.

“We realized that some of our most committed members wanted to dedicate a lot more time to actively resisting Trump,” Girma said, adding that weekly meetings for the club have changed in tone to reflect a more resistive post-election spirit.

Breakout sessions devoted to specific issues — voter protections, abortion rights and fundraising for the ACLU — have allowed members to research and engage with topics in which they are most invested. Each working group presents its findings to the larger group, and then all members reconvene for a more explicit discussion of the administration. In several meetings, the group has

read the text of Trump’s executive orders together, analyzing their legal implications and impact on issues such as the Dakota Access Pipeline and the rights of Muslim Americans and immigrants.

The group’s specifically legalistic breakdown of emerging policy has attracted unfamiliar faces at meetings following the announcement of new orders, Girma said. Students have come looking for answers from their wonky peers.

The transformation of the Brown ACLU into a force for the opposition was just one manifestation of a larger groundswell of resistance to the Trump administration. Post-election turmoil also gave rise to activist groups like Indivisible and Resist Hate RI, grassroots networks mobilizing to obstruct the Trump agenda. At Brown, there was the Brown Progressive Action Committee.

The idea for BPAC originated with Jeffrey Salvadore ’17, a former president of Brown Democrats and of Brown Students for Hillary. In leading the latter, Salvadore saw countless Brown students who had not previously associated with the Brown Democrats actively engage with progressive politics in the context of the high-stakes election.

“We wanted to keep those people and refocus their efforts towards action,” he said. “To do that, we did need a new structure and organization, because the (Brown Democrats) does what it does pretty well, and what it does is not necessarily activism. So we thought, ‘Let’s do a new group just focused on that.’”

Salvadore brought the idea to other members of the Brown Democrats and Brown Students for Hillary. The BPAC board appointments and launch were orchestrated by the Brown Democrats.

BPAC “is designed to be a space for students at Brown to come together and take political action regardless of their ideology,” said Aidan Calvelli ’19, founding chair of the group. The self-identified nonpartisan nature of the group is what distinguishes it from others on campus and situates it for long-term “progressive” action,

SHOSHANA SIMONS / HERALD

After Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election, many students who had organized in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign joined new efforts to advance the progressive agenda.

he added.

“Many people in this country and at this school don’t necessarily identify” as Democrats, Calvelli said. “When you start labeling yourself like that at Brown, you limit the people who would otherwise agree with you on the issues.”

The group is structured to allow individuals to actively work on issues they care most about while still being part of a larger network, said Fernando Medina ’19, BPAC’s engagement director.

Members divide themselves into subcommittees — immigration and refugee rights, education and health, voting rights and racial justice — to organize around students’ most pressing interests.

From there, BPAC serves most like a point of connection for members, relaying information about protests, legislative hearings or local politicians in need of a coordinated email barrage.

“We didn’t want to say, ‘Look, we made this new student group at Brown, and now we’ve come to be the saviors of Providence and Rhode Island politics,’” Calvelli said. “The activists that have been on the ground organizing for years know a lot better what’s important and what works than some students who just started a club,” he added.

“We’re saying, ‘Here are these things that are going on, and we’re going to tap into this.’”

Despite an issue-based approach, many of these groups bear the makings of party lines. The ACLU is a self-professed apolitical animal but has dedicated millions of dollars and an army of legal soldiers explicitly to fight back against the president’s legislative agenda.

“While the ACLU is fundamentally nonpartisan, the Trump administration in particular stands against everything we stand for, and so there’s no sugar coating needed,” Girma said. “The national ACLU has made a note that whenever Trump strikes, we strike back.”

BPAC, though claiming to be a space for members of all political identities, has devoted itself to resistance against policies championed by the Republican Party. Cohn sits on the board of BPAC and Calvelli on the board of the Brown Democrats. But for Calvelli, the issues BPAC addresses are not owned by Democrats. “Those aren’t partisan, and they don’t have to be in line with the Democratic Party at all,” he said.

To Calvelli, the future of politics at Brown in the Trump era seems much more open than it did prior to the election. Avenues for new supporters to get involved in campus political activity are a product of the post-election environment and represent the beginning of something new.

“It’s important to understand there’s a history of Brown students not really doing anything, or taking over events and taking up a lot of space,” Calvelli said. The efforts students are now taking are “more about trying to be open to helping in whatever ways people want us to help, not coming in like we have all the solutions. Because we’re students here.”

COMMENCEMENT 2017

15

Trying togetherness

Redefining community for a diverse and digital Brown

I

f the term community implies shared characteristics, values or behaviors, speaking of “the Brown community” today may be an exercise more fraught than ever before.

The Brown community has never been more diverse. Need-blind domestic admission began with the class of 2007; the demographics of this year’s graduating class reflect the advances of 11 admission cycles without preference for wealthy applicants.

In addition to increased diversity, this year’s graduating class, one of the last of the media’s much mused-upon millennial generation, grew up with social media. Today’s students grew up in online communities unbound by ties of place, exacerbating the difficulty of 1,500 people coming together for college to form a cohesive social unit.

Along with the challenges of the times, Brown has prided itself on an ethos of hyper-individuality since at least the advent of the New Curriculum in the late 1960s. Brown, famous for the open curriculum, is a place where talented students from around the world convene to be the architects of their own educations; it is a place without universal requirements where no single experience other than the fact of living on campus for a few years binds the student body together.

When administrators speak of “the Brown community” in those emails that pop up in all undergraduates’ inboxes, various members of that community understand different things by the term. Others see it as a fantasy.

Defining community

President Christina Paxson P’19 sees a campuswide community as manifesting through mutual empathy and respect among all members of the Brown community, not necessarily through universal agreement on issues or time spent together.

“We’re not trying to maintain a superficial politeness on campus” by asking community members to withhold their opinions or differences in conversation, Paxson said.

Mary Grace Almandrez, assistant vice president and dean of students, said administrators detect a spirit of community on campus in peer mentoring groups such as the Meiklejohn program and the Residential Peer Leader program as well as in supportive centers such as the FirstGeneration Low-Income Center.

“There’s an ethic of care that isn’t found in a lot of places and that is particularly strong here,” she said.

Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain of the University, noted the sense of community that emerges

16 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

during events like Spring Weekend, when a “wonderful manifestation of people” appears on the Main Green. She also pointed to the return of alums for Commencement and reunion weekends year after year.

Moments like those “offer a sense that we’re all (part of) Brown,” said MaryLou McMillan, assistant vice president for campus life.

But administrators also noted that outside of these large formal events and structures, there are disparate communities of students that do not necessarily interact or agree with one another on what can be divisive and deeply personal issues. At the same time, they feel those differences strengthen Brown.

“Sometimes our sense of belonging can be grounded more in a cohort or intra-community frame, but that doesn’t have to compete with or detract from a larger or shared sense of a Brown community. In fact, it can make it more meaningful,” wrote Eric Estes, vice president for campus life and student services, in a follow-up email to The Herald.

After four years at Brown, seniors expressed familiarity with the divisions among small communities that can leave a broader sense of campuswide community elusive. This lack of a broader sense of community can make forging strong relationships with other students challenging.

Oksana Goretaya ’17, co-captain of the women’s rugby team, said that at Brown, “We focus a lot on our differences,” which can make identifying a campus-wide sense of community difficult.

Mike Petro ’17, a member of the Brown/RISD Catholic Community, said the most common complaint among the group’s students is a feeling that “everyone was hanging out without them.”

Petro said a solid community of people with whom to spend his time never fully materialized

By Shira Buchsbaum

in his years at Brown.

“It’s hard to say there’s a strong community (on campus) when I feel isolated.”

Building community

Seniors said their first weeks at Brown were critical in shaping their initial communities. All first-year students are placed in first-year-only residence halls, a policy that helps the Office of Residential Life cater to the needs of first-year students, said Kate Tompkins, associate director for programs in ResLife.

Petro noted that the physical layout of his firstyear dorm, Emery-Woolley Hall, posed obstacles to creating community. His floor did not have a lounge, leaving students to hang out in hallways or cramped dorm rooms.

“The best community forms when people have a place to go,” Petro said. “Central places provide ways of making low-cost spaces of interaction, because if I’m going to a place, and you’re going to that place, we have the same expectations.”

Petro found that not having a central social space greatly contributed to Catholic students’ struggles to build community, and he joined Alpha Delta Phi in search of a residential community.

Noah Fitzgerel ’17, who served as president of Brown/RISD Hillel in 2016, agreed that it is a “privilege to have designated space to make one’s home.”

Fitzgerel said having a central building dedicated to Jewish life is important for students “who want to feel like they can identify a Jewish space on campus.”

Extra-curricular organizations also play a large part in shaping how engaged students feel with the Brown community. Gaby Gonzalez ’17 feels that much of her not having a sense of community at Brown is a “function of not finding the right

COURTESY OF MARGARET KIEFFER

Oksana Goretaya ’17 said it was with the rugby team, of which she is a co-captain, that she found a satisfying sense of belonging and community at Brown. She called the team “what kept me here.”

extra-curriculars.”

Kelly Conway ’17, president of Brown Republicans, said that in her first year at Brown, she did not feel like she fit into the culture and community on campus. She took it upon herself to become politically active, and “that’s when I realized that I did have a place in the community,” she said.

Being engaged with Brown Republicans gave Conway “a sense of empowerment socially” in a politically active environment, and it provided her a way to contribute to campus discourse.

While on a small scale students emphasized day-to-day activities as integral to building community, administrators noted that on a larger scale the University deploys a variety of coordinated strategies to engage students, staff members and faculty members in attempts to foster empathy and respect across boundaries of identity and opinion.

Almandrez and Estes host a Sunday night dinner program with various students, and Estes also invites various student groups to his home for dinners. Paxson also meets with students during lunches and at events.

“I hope that builds a sense of community, for students to know that they have a president who actually likes them and wants to be accessible,” Paxson said.

Students expressed ambivalence as to whether a perceived lack of community on campus is an institutional issue or simply a feature of campus life.

Gonzalez used to think that her isolation was a “me problem.”

“I don’t tend to blame the institution, but when I do talk to other students, they say there are a lot of other students who feel the same way,” she said.

“There’s a false perception of vulnerability on campus. People are really open to talking about their political views, which makes them seem vulnerable, but people are holding back on how they’re really doing,” which inhibits creating authentic connections, Gonzalez said.

As social media has shaped this year’s class more than any before it, the class of 2017’s four years at Brown have been influenced by an intense political atmosphere. In the class’ second month on campus, a group of protesters effectively shut down a speech by former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly, citing Kelly’s championing of stop-and-frisk policies that disproportionately targeted people of color.

The incident alerted both students and administrators to a feeling among many that steps needed to be taken to make Brown more inclusive as it was becoming more diverse. Following years saw the release of the University’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, a $165 million effort to, among other goals, make all members of the campus community feel more included.

Conway said the Kelly incident made her “acutely aware that there were a lot of people (on campus) who think differently” from herself and other members of Brown Republicans. In the immediate aftermath, she and other members of the club “treaded a lot more lightly” in expressing what could be controversial views on campus, but they also realized “there was a lot of room to make an impact” in terms of increasing representation of conservative viewpoints in campus discourse.

Conway agreed that students should not be expected to respond to degrading comments civilly. But she also said that in political conversations, students sometimes “misdirect” their anger, refusing to listen to different arguments due to a misconception of conservative ideals as monolithic.

Fitzgerel said that in his time at Brown members of his class have “become more critical — in a positive way — about the sorts of programming that centers on campus” plan and promote, as well as “the sort of voices that we choose to elevate and the sorts of conversations we choose to center.”

Signs of the times

After events that impact specific groups of students, such as the flag vandalism on Veterans Day in 2016 or the cancellation of the Janet Mock lecture last spring, Paxson and other administrators work with and listen to the students affected.

Those events often encourage people to reach out to administrators and ask that the University implement policies to ensure certain behaviors do not recur, Paxson said.

But those situations pose a question of “what should be governed by rules and what should be governed by norms,” Paxson said. The flag vandalism was a policy violation, so the appropriate disciplinary measures were taken. The Janet Mock incident was the result of free petitioning.

The University can only model the type of behavior in which it would like students to engage, Paxson said.

“It’s also the responsibility of students to create that sense of community,” she said.

Petro noted that today’s technological norms make it very easy not to “enlist” in in-person communication and community-building by using various social platforms and texting to stay in touch with friends off campus.

“It’s easy to check into low-grade digital relationships instead of having to check into the challenging but maybe more directly rewarding relationships onsight on campus,” he said.

While social media provides a great method to stay in touch with people, it is “pretty individualistic,” Petro added. “I always find that it’s hard to feel like you’re a part of something on social media.”

Fitzgerel said that, on the contrary, social media can bring students into contact with people they may not see on campus on a regular basis.

Connecting online is “incredibly important to (building) solidarity and community,” Fitzgerel said.

Bringing together disparate groups

TIMOTHY MUELLER-HARDER / HERALD

Students gathered for the annual performance of Dave Binder on Sunday of 2017’s Spring Weekend.

Differences of opinion do not foreclose the possibility of a sense of campus-wide community, Fitzgerel said.

“Community is about a mutual commitment to one another. We see community come together to memorialize people at vigils and in the classroom, when professors invite students to dinner,” Fitzgerel said. “Students do expect and accord each other a certain sense of empathy and respect.”

After the election, Conway met with Paxson, and they discussed the “assumption that no one on campus could be a Trump supporter, much less think about being one.” Conway said, “It was a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ — and the entire campus was the ‘us.’ There was no in between.”

But Conway also noted that over the last few months, “people have become a lot more engaged and open to listening to different kinds of dialogue.”

Petro feels students do not place enough value on deliberately fostering a sense of community on campus.

“Community is its own reward. You’re not going to get something on your resume or hear a great show by going to a coffee hour,” Petro said.

Goretaya agreed that creating a sense of campus-wide community is students’ responsibility and that community entails a sense of mutual respect and understanding. But she does not see that manifest at Brown, where she has experienced judgment repeatedly for being a varsity athlete and a religiously observant individual.

“It’s going to take more selfless action and more selfless fault,” Goretaya said.

Ultimately, Goretaya did find a home at Brown within the rugby team. As she struggled to adjust to the class privilege at Brown and being surrounded by the highest-achieving students in the country, she said rugby was “what kept me here.”

Conway said she chose Brown because she was “up for the challenge” of being in a place where she knew the majority of people would hold political opinions different than her own.

Using the opportunity of being in the classroom with people who think differently “to really think through what you believe in” is “the most valuable experience,” she said.

COMMENCEMENT 2017

17

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Voices of 2017 Thoughts and reflections from 11 members of the graduating class

Anything but a cheesy column

My senior year of high school I wrote a paper for my AP Language class trying to figure out what makes going to college worth the money. I could not actually answer the question, so the resulting paper was tragically bad. I argued that experiences combined with academics define college, making it a unique experience worth the investment for those ready to take advantage of it. A canned essay searching for a silver bullet-type answer, it read like a cheesy college brochure written by a pseudo-intellectual without a high school degree.

Which it was. Not only was my argument flimsy

and poorly articulated, but it was also premised on a set of hypothetical first-hand experiences that I obviously could not back up.

Fast forward four years, and here we are. I hope I have already convinced you that my writing has improved since then (and if I have not, you should probably stop reading). In addition to some technical improvements, I now possess some first-hand experience that could inform a legitimate answer to the question I first posed in that shamelessly titled essay, “Not for School but for Life we Learn.”

Surprisingly, though, I do not feel any more capable of offering a definitive answer to the question than I did four years ago. In the jumbled mess of my original paper, I touched on the importance of developing social skills and a professional network as a means of extracting value from a traditional college experience. I have certainly done that at Brown. I talked about “getting your money’s worth” by engaging with professors and academic advisors. Again, I have done that. Learning time management? Check. Leadership roles in clubs?

Check. Got my money’s worth.

From what I can decipher, high-school Lainie placed a premium on career readiness as a means of justifying the expense of college. Re-reading my paper, I cringed at one particularly laughable quote — “Colleges are smart; course requirements

A friend and a book At Brown, I have often been asked what my favorite book is or asked friends what their favorite books are. This is always a curious question, mostly because it offers an opportunity to learn about what the other person cares about without having to make them feel uncomfortable. In this same fashion, I will give you an account of my favorite book.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” is the first sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez.

The first time I read this sentence in June 2015 my hopes and goals were solidified — I was now certain that I wanted to be a writer. Later that summer, I read half of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But I haven’t gotten to finish the book

yet — every time I open it, I reread half of the story twice, sometimes thrice, then end up going to the beginning and starting all over again.

My journey with Márquez did not begin in 2015. During the first week of my freshman year, my roommate, Eduardo, mentioned that his favorite book was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and he recommended that I read the book in Spanish. That semester, I took an introductory Spanish class. Three years later, I started reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and enjoyed it immensely.

But why am I not able to bring myself to finish reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude”? Every time I read the book, I have always enjoyed it to such an extent that I dread having to finish it, as I may not have a story to look forward to! This semester, I decided to get a first-edition copy of

By Lainie Rowland

exist for a reason, and the classes needed to fulfill a major can be the foundation for many different career paths.” Open curriculum aside, Brown was a worthwhile transaction in this sense insofar as I am now able to say that I have secured a job. But this narrow, contractual answer feels unsatisfying. I went to college knowing it to be a concrete path toward gainful employment, but that does not make college “worth it” as much as it plainly describes the nature of the society in which we live. And I still have trouble making the argument that the many intangible elements of the Brown experience — all the cliches about friendships and late nights and misadventures — can be put on one side of an equation in order to balance the cost of attendance on the other side.

Rather, I will say that Brown was a great wingman for many of my best relationships, whether they be social, intellectual or otherwise. Brown staged a setting conducive to four years of deep learning. Brown also provided a wealth of resources for my endeavors. But both the growth I have experienced over the past four years and the role of a college education in bringing me to this point are intangible and hard to define. Ironically, the clearest thing they have in common are their contributions to my increased ability to embrace

Continued on page 24

By Daniel Murage the book. It arrived in the mail three weeks ago.

It is rugged, a bit torn and smells of old paper, but hey, it’s a first-edition book! I hope that this will be motivation enough to finish reading it.

And just like my relationship with my favorite book, I have been hesitant to come to terms with the fact that I’ll be leaving Brown. Brown has been my home. I have made great friends, established relationships with mentors and received numerous opportunities for personal and academic growth.

For these, I know that I will not really be leaving Brown — I hope that the friendships I have made and the connections that I have fostered at Brown will continue to thrive past College Hill.

And as I come to terms with leaving Brown and reflect on how Brown introduced me to my

Continued on page 24

COMMENCEMENT 2017

23

Voices of 2017

Chill out I entered Brown with big aspirations, wide eyes and a hope for something incredible. Like many of my peers, I was the valedictorian and president of many different clubs in high school. But after my freshman year, I soon realized that almost every Brown student was accustomed to past success. Brown was a community engulfed in talent, passion and drive. I felt lost trying to find my own personal success in a pool of common achievement. I wondered how I could make any substantial impact on such a vibrant community.

My parents are Cambodian genocide refugees who ingrained in me a drive to become the absolute best version of myself and prioritized education as a privilege for which they were once persecuted. With that drive rooted in my mind, I wanted to excel in every facet of life. I had high expectations for myself, as so many other students at Brown do. I pushed myself; I saw my peers push themselves. Everyone I knew worked incredibly hard to meet their own expectations.

It was all too common for someone outside the community to assume Brown was “chill” and even lacked “real” grades.

As Brown students, we could all collectively sigh over those assumptions. We definitely had grades — you can check my transcript for proof.

Though Brown is known for being stereotypically “chill,” our all-nighters at the Sci Li, crying in the stacks and mental breakdowns would argue otherwise. We worked tirelessly. I was plagued by the idea of being chill even as so many of us had studied 50 hours for a final exam or paper and still received a grade that felt inadequate.

My close friends and I often felt like we lacked a definitive achievement. Many times we would question if we belonged here and if our accomplishments mattered. I had thought Brown was chill, but it seemed taboo to talk to anyone if you were struggling.

After my freshman spring, I felt inadequate and lost at Brown. It felt like a mistake to be among so many brilliant and successful peers. I thought I would transfer to another school where my perceived lack of success would be less burdensome. I filled out a transfer form and stared at it for days. I never told anyone.

Sophomore year, I was determined to find a version of success that would be satisfying. I took five classes for the next five semesters, feeling like I had to prove myself. I pushed myself — far from the supposed “chill” Brown was supposed to have. I spent almost 13 hours studying in the Sci Li basement every day. I worked the hardest my

24 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

By Lindsey Taing body physically could. Even if my body suffered, I continued. The one instance in which I sought help, I contacted a dean. I had three exams on the same day, and none of them could be moved.

The dean suggested I “time manage.” I cried in the fifth floor stacks. I cried almost every day of sophomore year, and my health deteriorated.

I was miserable, but no one knew as I kept the darkness locked inside.

As I continued to see a lack of success in myself, I began to lose self-worth and the motivation to continue my education. Despite my crumbling mental state, no one knew the extent to which I suffered. I was notoriously perky and smiley; I donned a resting “nice face.” I was an upbeat and caring individual, so it seemed simple to pretend I was “okay” on the outside. The facade I had created hid all pain. I did not want anyone to know about my feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness. I did not want pity; I wanted to deal with it myself. I could not imagine how many other students related to me and felt uncomfortable talking about it.

Finally, I realized I was not okay. I was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. At first, I even struggled to tell my family. For the next three years, I continued to battle with my mental health and the image that I was supposed to be “relaxed” and “chill” while succeeding in all aspects of life. I painted this image to show others that I had it all together, but I did not.

Every day felt dark, as if there were no escape.

I had completely lost myself. Junior year, I still probably cried every other day.

Before I knew it, I was a senior, jaded and unexcited about things that used to grab my attention. After three years on campus, I finally sought out open discussions with peers about my mental health. I was tired of letting critical views of failure take over my life. I started allowing myself to see what made Brown a facilitating, encouraging learning environment. I was able to see how many people related to me and how receptive students on campus could be to truthfully talking about the implications of mental health. The topic did not have to be taboo. I came to appreciate the impact that this campus has had on my life. I was not alone, and I never was. I could acknowledge that maybe I was not okay, but I did belong here.

Throughout the debilitating mental illness, Brown has allowed me to become resilient while connecting me with passionate, caring people

Continued on page 28

Continued from page 23 uncertainty.

If I were to write the same paper now, I would spin off some jargon about the utility of a college degree as a signaling mechanism and as a vehicle for preserving the current distribution of wealth and power in the United States. I might even entertain some philosophical yarn about utilitarian methods of defining and calculating worthiness — the narrower the definition, the easier the fulfillment. I would also acknowledge that a school like Brown is well-positioned to prepare us for a career, life and so on. I would write that even the understanding I have developed while here about what it is like to go to Brown — what’s great about it, what’s frustrating and what to get at the GCB — does not make me qualified to deliver a judgment on my broad question. Other than being marked by a degree ceremony, the end of my college experience provides no singularly profound message.

I would like to think that my willingness to accept this open-endedness is reflective of my increased comfort with a world enmeshed in ambiguities and uncertainty. If that is the case, then I suppose I have come full circle. To that end, maybe walking through the Van Wickle Gates has some inherent metaphorical meaning. But this time around, I do not have to write a cheesy essay to prove its worth. So I wrote this one instead.

Continued from page 23 best friend and my favorite book, this connection has always made me wonder: If I had decided to leave Brown after that first week of my freshman year, how would my life have turned out?

Would I still be friends with Eduardo? Would I be inspired by Márquez? Would I want to be a writer? Would I be narrating or writing about this incident somewhere else?

I am not sure. But what I am sure about is this: During my first week at Brown, I met Eduardo, who shared stories of his life with me. Eduardo became my best friend, and his favorite book became the kind of book that I hope to someday write. During my first week at Brown, I gained friendship and purpose.

Over four years here, I have met wonderful people and been afforded numerous opportunities. I have learned, and I hope that I have inspired.

And if I am lucky enough, just like Eduardo, I hope that I, along with the rest of the class of 2017, will have set someone else’s life on a different path.

Voices of 2017

Play It Right (Sylvan Esso) I cannot begin to quantify the number of parties I have attended with Steff and Stefan where we have taken over the music. From tiny dorm rooms to large bars, the three of us are constantly arriving somewhere, deciding we want to hear something different and asserting our musical tastes on everyone else, grinning with glee when we hear other people blurting, “I love this song!” and watching everyone, including ourselves, begin to dance embarrassingly in corners. Almost all the socializing I’ve done over my four years as a Brunonian has been with one or both of these people standing next to me, letting me analyze every room, putting up with my overly large arm gestures when I get excited and, of course, dancing late into the night.

Everyone has her story of her first interaction with a future first-year roommate, whether it was a stilted email exchange or a near-automatic Facebook friend request. Steff, however, followed me on Twitter. Our first real conversation happened when she responded to a tweet I had posted with Bon Iver lyrics — ap-

parently my musical tastes came as a pleasant surprise to her. While we always got along as roommates, I can pin down the start of our actual friendship to the night when we sat, lights off, on our respective beds, separated by 10 or so feet of Keeney linoleum, blasting Kanye West’s recently released album, “Yeezus.” We sat there in the dark, maybe once mumbling, “This is really good,” for the entire duration of the album. When I came home a few weeks later and she had fallen asleep midday with a Fleetwood Mac song I grew up with playing softly on her computer, I knew that Brown’s mysterious first-year-roommate algorithm had definitely worked out for us.

I met Stefan through a variety of embarrassing circumstances I will not describe here, but when I was barely friends with him, I found myself sitting on his desk chair late at night after a string of likely mediocre freshman parties, watching the music video for Stromae’s song, “Papaoutai.” We marveled at its creativity, the hypnotic wonder of the dance moves, the colors. He soon became a fixture in Steff ’s and my

Baby shoes Inspired by the mother of the protagonist Sam in “Transformers 2,” my dad proudly paraded through Keeney on orientation day with my baby shoes around his neck (or “baby booties,” as Sam’s mom calls them).

I took my first steps in these tiny red shoes.

They flew with me across the Pacific from Toronto to Beijing when I was barely two. Sixteen years later, my dad carefully packed them into his suitcase to Providence. Barely aware of their existence, I sensed that this pair of palm-sized mementos held more sentimental value for my parents than for me.

Growing up, I had always relied on my parents for advice. A trivial dilemma: what shoes to wear to prom? Or a major one: which university to attend? Involving my parents in every step was like a game of trust-fall. I openly embraced new risks, but only when assured that a safety net would catch me if I really “fell.” I expected my parents to right my wrongs before I hit the ground. This was the thinking that accompanied me as I first walked through the Van Wickle Gates.

Coming from Beijing, I had never watched a single football game, let alone the Super Bowl,

By Julia Stemmer room, pregaming for Friday nights out, discussing our beyond-boring applied math professor and strategizing for the housing lottery.

Sophomore year, the two of them lived down the hall from each other while I lived with a roommate in a dorm a few blocks away. When my roommate’s taste for nothing but The Smiths became too much to bear, I would walk over to Marcy House, and the three of us would sit in Stefan’s tiny single, where the soundtrack was always FKA Twigs, Grimes, Lana del Rey and Lorde.

Junior year we mostly played dance music and forced everyone we knew to listen to Skrillex’s “Stranger” — a lot. We blared Diplo on weekdays and synced up Keys N Krates to strange and silly Youtube videos. On quieter evenings, Stefan would request Alt-J, and the three of us would talk, planning our futures both separately and apart: Stefan, an international student, had no idea where he would be in the world, and Steff would adamantly refuse

Continued on page 26

By Vicky Ding and I initially thought Greek life was a secret society for history majors. Being international on top of being an already lost freshman was not easy. In the first months of college, I constantly dialed those familiar digits for advice like a natural reflex, looking for detailed analyses of the pros and cons of joining a certain student group or for lengthy discussions of the correct course choices to support my career plans.

Yet it was not long before these “consulting sessions” with my parents became a one-way monologue. I labored to explain how “shopping period” worked, what “S/NC” meant, why the Sci Li was not exactly for sciences and the many other aspects of Brown undergraduate student life that my parents were not involved in. They could not judge a course based on a mere fiveword title without having sat through the professor’s passionate (or bone-dry) lecture. They did not feel the exhilarating chills down my spine as clever ideas bounced off one another in my seminar discussion.

Having received his MBA from a top Canadian university, my dad was among the first batches of Chinese students to study abroad.

But that was still 25 years ago, in a different school and with a considerably less diverse and liberal student body. The picture he painted of

Continued on page 27

COMMENCEMENT 2017

25

Voices of 2017

The changing of the generations

By Fatima Husain

Making your way to the top of College Hill is not always easy. In the fall of 1982, fresh off his flight from Islamabad, Pakistan and totally alone, Syed Ejaz Husain ’86 MD’90 trekked up the uneven cobblestone sidewalk with his suitcase encasing all of his belongings for college. The young international student’s bus driver told him buses didn’t go up the hill and left Syed at the intersection of North Main and Waterman on a hot summer day. When the sweat-drenched, overdressed and mustachioed 19-year-old finally arrived at Faunce House, he asked fellow students for directions before finding his new dormitory, Everett Hall. Once he settled in and oriented himself within the campus, he embarked upon two intertwined journeys. The first: navigating Brown as an international undergraduate student; the second, and perhaps more daunting: living in the United States, which he would soon call his permanent home.

Syed’s small world grew magnitudes during his time at Brown, thanks to the welcoming and collaborative atmosphere Brown is still famous for today. That is not to say that Brown was not competitive at the time — in fact, alums often point out that Brown’s admissions were more competitive than Harvard’s, certainly validating a certain t-shirt still sold in the Brown Bookstore today. Brown was the place to be, but it was still quite easy to be out of place at Brown. Though both Brown and the United States have seen immense social, academic and cultural progress over the past decades, many students, international or not, still feel similarly out of place.

Perhaps what helped Syed jumpstart his journeys most during his time at Brown was his friendship with his freshman-year roommate, Andy Lazris ’86, a bright young history buff eager to take full advantage of Brown’s open curriculum. The two bonded immediately, though

they came from entirely different cultural and social backgrounds — Syed from conservative and nascent Pakistan and Andy from progressive New Jersey.

The two developed a unique relationship that combined traditional friendship and mentorship. Though the two young men shared similar interests — most notably medicine — their levels of preparation for college were vastly different.

Primarily educated in Pakistan and England, Syed found that his study methods and unfamiliarity with the liberal arts hindered his ability to explore new subject areas while still successfully completing the rigorous pre-medical curriculum Brown offered. Andy, on the other hand, relished the opportunity to delve into history and challenged himself often by taking upperlevel courses as an underclassman. The contrast exemplifies Brown’s commitment to nurturing personal academic interests — students may pursue whatever they wish to study.

Syed concentrated in biology and Andy in history, though both eventually attended medical school in the following years. Though the two continued their strong friendship in the years after college through email and phone calls, the now-practicing physicians reunited in person in the fall of 2013, when it was time to drop off their own children at Brown: myself and David Lazris, both graduating this year in the class of 2017.

One generation later, a new friendship began to develop. But our journeys are very different.

Instead of spending days cooped up in the upper levels of the Sci Li (we now only spend hours there) or spending most of our evenings at the East Campus Dining Center, David and I have been able to branch out. David is on the crew team and performs medical research during his summers, while I have served as the science editor for The College Hill Independent and work

in an organic geochemistry lab. David concentrated in history while I chose to concentrate in geochemistry. David and I both pursued the pre-medical curriculum, and we took many classes together as our fathers did. Like our fathers before us, we have been able to bond over the difficulty of classes and our satisfaction with being able to pursue the subject areas toward which we are most drawn.

When David and I meet up, we often find artifacts from our fathers’ friendships in our own. We relay our respective fathers’ stories to one another and find much-needed humor in the nostalgia that we ourselves will hopefully feel one day. We also find comfort in knowing that we share experiences relatable to those of our fathers — stressful exam periods, excitement for Spring Weekend and awe for Professor Ken Miller ’70 P’02, who taught his famous biology course even then.

So much has changed since then. Brown and America are different. Yet, like always, Brown students are ready to engage in debate and discussion, all while focusing heavily on furthering their own liberal educations. From one generation to another, Brown continues to foster critical conversations and challenge us to embark on our own journeys with confidence and knowledge.

Continued from page 25

Barely 21, we were nearly the oldest people there, laughing at the dolled-up high-schoolers while we just danced and danced.

Senior year has been a blur of Stefan and I dancing in the living room to M.I.A.’s latest album while Steff and I debate which Rihanna song to play at Captain Seaweed’s. I am going to miss every time we played Cher’s “Believe” to end our nights out and every time we have cracked up at the sound of “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics, which inevitably recalls that time a friend hijacked the music and only

played that song for an unbearable 30 minutes straight at a party we threw in my Young Orchard apartment.

To Steff and Stefan, who have let me play “Collard Greens” by Schoolboy Q as many times as I have wanted, who will end up at business school in North Carolina and teaching math in India, respectively: Thank you for sharing your musical tastes with me for four years, and I cannot wait for you to come back to New York so we can dance in my living room for years to come.

to return to Florida, but beyond that, she did not know what would happen. Every time we talked about post-Brown life, I would always say, as a lifelong Brooklynite, “I’ll be in New York, so come visit.”

And both of them did: Stefan and I once yelled song requests to an overwhelmed-looking bartender in a noisy bar frequented by Columbia students, and Steff came to visit one summer when we bought tickets to see Flume.

26 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

And when we depart from thy friendly protection, And boldly launch out upon life’s stormy main, We’ll oft look behind us with grateful affection, And live our bright college days over again.

— “Alma Mater,” James Andrews DeWolf, class of 1861

Voices of 2017

Brown in a quarter century

Syed Ejaz Husain ’86 MD’90 and Andy Lazris ’86 in their freshman dorm, Everett Hall, in 1982.

In 1982, an incoming freshman from New Jersey met his roommate, an international student from Pakistan. In their initial conversation, Andy Lazris ’86 and Syed Ejaz Husain ’86 MD’90 both quickly acknowledged that neither of them drank, but they agreed to begin college anew, attending a frat party on Wriston Quad that night. Pretending to drink from their cups but actually pouring their beer on the floor, they soon realized Wriston was not their social scene and left to spend the night talking in their room, quickly becoming friends.

Twenty-one years later in 2013, Syed and Andy reacquainted on Pembroke Green, both dropping off their children to meet their own college roommates at Brown. Syed’s daughter Fatima and I awkwardly sat over a Meeting Street Cafe brunch

Continued from page 25 his own college life ultimately failed to match mine. I was the one experiencing every angle of Brown firsthand.

Without the safety net of my parents’ guidance, I began treading the waters on my own.

Despite my initial reluctance, I realized that if there was one place to start crafting my own path, Brown was that place. I also realized I was not alone in these foreign waters because every one of my fellow classmates was in her own process of self-discovery.

I took eight different classes in eight different departments during my freshman year. I learned the steps of the waltz in Sayles Hall and danced

By David Lazris

as these two friends relived their glory days.

While tied together by their room freshman year, their relationship went beyond simple friendship. Both Andy and Syed came in with intentions of entering medicine, Syed already guaranteed admission to the Warren Alpert Medical School through the eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education. As Syed was new to America, he sought help in how to study, prepare for studying medicine and adjust to life in another country. My father convinced Syed to work at Brown over the summers cutting onions in the basement of the Ratty, while my father cleaned and painted boiler plants for Brown with local Providence residents.

Both Fatima and I entered Brown with the same intention of studying medicine. Yet to be “pre-med” in 1982 was vastly different from what it meant in 2013. Both Fatima and I were told that scrubbing boiler plants would probably not meet medical school admission requirements; instead, we were pushed to do medical research at academic institutions. This is not to say that the older generation did not work as hard — Syed would wake up before sunrise in order to save study spaces for Andy and other friends on the 12th floor of the Sci Li so they could study throughout the weekend. In the same space of the upper floors of the Sci Li, Fatima and I have met many times to delve into subjects like organic chemistry and seek advice from each other about anything from summer employment to plans for the weekend. Though generations apart, in both ours and our fathers’ experiences inclusion and collaboration superseded the competitive nature of the pre-med track.

As with their focus on inclusion, Brown stu-

dents have always prided themselves on fostering a socially progressive and forward-thinking campus community. This past fall, the election seemed over when talking to students on campus, with Hillary Clinton the clear projected victor. We envisioned an era of progress continuing through her presidency and a brighter future ahead. Yet as the results trickled in Nov. 8 and news organizations predicted a Donald Trump victory, an eerie and disturbing silence permeated campus.

Walking home that night, I did not see a single person on the street.

In 1984, the Brown campus was similarly optimistic about Walter Mondale’s prospects of defeating incumbent Ronald Reagan. When the results were announced, there was a similar shockwave sent through campus, with students bewildered by the massive margin by which Reagan won. In both generation’s college careers, America voted for a president whose beliefs ran counter to the Brown norm of social progressivism. Thirty-two years later, Brown students’ commitment to social progress remains an important and distinctive part of the university’s culture. The policies and candidates have changed, but Brown remains on the forefront of pushing for increased equality in the political and social spheres.

Thirty years later, Andy and Syed are still in constant communication, whether it be about politics, medicine or their children. Their friendship has flourished, though Syed lives in Iowa and my father in Maryland. As I look forward to my future, I cannot help but look back at their past.

Though different in many ways, Brown and the inclusion, collaboration and social advancement it upholds are still prevalent on this special campus.

until my toes went numb. I tutored refugee children from Somalia alongside local volunteers.

I received my bid from Kappa Delta, a national sorority with 120 years of history.

And then there were the not-so-easy decisions. After spending numerous nights covered in oil paint and combing through the RISD course catalogue for four semesters, I found I was not that passionate about painting anymore. At some point between reading Balzac and Faulkner, I realized that I enjoyed books for leisure more than for an English degree. I tried out investment banking one summer despite my parents’ initial insistence that I was not fit for the industry. Yet looking back today, weeks from graduation, I could not be happier with

my economics and art history concentrations, knowing that I made these decisions based on my own experiences.

During these four years, I have come to terms with the fact that my parents cannot and will not hold my hand every step of the way. College is a time for growth and self-discovery. It is also a painstaking process of letting go, for us students and for our parents. Sometimes we tread slowly and cautiously, and sometimes we stride forward with confidence. While I know that my parents will always support me unconditionally, I am now confident enough to walk out of the Van Wickle Gates in the direction I choose to take.

After all, I have outgrown those “baby booties.”

COMMENCEMENT 2017

27

Voices of 2017

Atlas

By Nikhil Kumar

In high school, I started a Tumblr account with the username, “peoplecartographer.” I titled the blog “Atlas” and wrote a short description: “A collection of maps. An exploration of the world.” My posts featured maps I found online — including a map of terms used in the United States to refer to water fountains highlighting Rhode Island’s peculiar preference for “bubblers” — accompanied by a paragraph of my analysis. Though I concluded this “Atlas” during the summer after my freshman year here at Brown, geography has remained one of the most important tools I use to make sense of the world. Reflecting upon the geographies specific to Brown brings into focus both the immense privilege and the weighty duty attached to our undergraduate experience.

Starting small, consider the geography of our jewel-like College Hill campus. Many of my friends know how much I love to lie on the grass on the Main Green, flanked by Sayles Hall, University Hall and Faunce House, feeling the Providence sun’s warmth on my cheeks or meditating in the trees’ cool shade and then posting a photo on Instagram with the hashtag #BrownUniversity.

The Main Green is the heart of campus, the origin of so much of the university’s life. It hosts orientation events and commencement ceremonies, Spring Weekend concerts and quiet vigils, protests and celebrations. Students, administrators, faculty and staff members cross paths with people whom they may never meet otherwise and walk in the footsteps of all those who have animated Brown through the centuries. On a campus that extends from the Jewelry District to Ives Street and for a community with roots all over the world, the Main Green is a point of unity — geographically and spiritually.

But the pristine and functional condition of the Main Green doesn’t come easy. In fact, it requires sustained effort throughout the year.

Facilities workers salt and plow the sidewalks when it freezes and snows, build and dismantle stages and rows of chairs for special events and aerate and seed the lawns each spring. Despite the wear and tear of harsh winters and repeated trampling, the Main Green is ceaselessly renewed and cherished by the Brown community. And just as we acknowledge the efforts that have produced today’s Main Green in all its shimmering glory, we must never forget the labor of the slaves who built University Hall or, in more recent decades, the student activism that has used this space to shape the more inclusive university we attend today.

Of course, the geography of the Brown experience extends far beyond the Main Green.

From my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, I have flown into T. F. Green Airport at the

Continued from page 30

Charlesfield and Thayer, the location that defaults to “Home” on my phone’s map app.

Or I would mention sitting at a sticky table in the front cave at the Ratty with Maddy.

Or studying and watching strange YouTube videos in J. Walter Wilson with Kelsey and Baylor.

Or 195 Angell Street and the Herald staffers.

Or my mentors’ offices in Peter Green and Sharpe Houses.

Or Unit 18 in West Andrews.

Or the basement of Faunce with Lauren.

I’d tell you about Brown.

In those years before I was capable of calling Brown home, I had known home to be much more than a physical place; it was, more importantly, a feeling. Brown is my home because of the people I have met here who have provided me with a sense of security in becoming who I aspire to be — a writer, a historian, a wannabe comedian, a mentor and a friend.

So, if you were to ask me about my home now, I would tell you about the intersection of

28 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

beginning of each semester. I have ventured by train to New York and Philadelphia and interned in Boston during the summer. I have studied abroad in Paris, and then again in London, and explored nearby cities like Brussels and Vienna.

Each member of the class of 2017 has her own story of movement and wanderlust: coming to the United States for the first time as an international student, transferring to Brown from

another college or volunteering in the Providence community. The local, national and global mobility available to Brown students thanks to the University’s alumni network and study abroad opportunities is stunning.

Rather than disconnecting us from Brown, time away from campus contributes immeasurably to our education. I carry with me at Brown all of the places I have visited and all of the lessons I have learned from them: lessons about my own capabilities and limitations, about the way people in other states and on different continents live, about language and cuisine and class and politics.

The challenge now is to put all of those lessons to work in the service of society. Just as protecting the Main Green from chaos and decay demands hard work, so too will constructing the future to which we aspire require great sacrifice.

As we look beyond College Hill, the task before us is made even more daunting by the fact that we will no longer be tethered to Brown. When we first marched through the Van Wickle Gates at Convocation, it was as if we were sketching the first line on a map of our undergraduate journeys.

During our four or more years here, we have filled in this map, sometimes hesitantly, often boldly.

As we pass through the Van Wickle Gates once more, we may feel as if we no longer need this map that we have so meticulously drawn.

But the personalized Brown geographies we have created will never be obsolete — we are merely turning to a blank page in our atlas. From the Main Green we will travel to San Francisco and Cape Town and Hong Kong and our hometowns and as-yet-unknown destinations. We will chart new maps. And surely, from time to time, we will flip back to the page labeled Brown, to reminisce and celebrate the special place to which we belong and to which we owe the unique privilege of serving the wider world.

Continued from page 24 whom I consider lifelong friends. I am incredibly thankful that I never submitted that college transfer form and made it through this journey along with my classmates. You are never alone at Brown, and maybe we are considered “chill” because we are driven yet also enthusiastic, empathetic and excited. Maybe I am not inherently chill and am all too Type A, but I am myself. And after three years of what seemed impossible to escape, I am genuinely happy. Thank you, Brown.

Finding friendship through food You can learn a lot about a person over a meal.

My best friends at Brown share my love of food and, in many cases, a similar eating schedule.

Every fall, I cherish the inaugural dinner of the semester, before classes start and when the only people in the dining halls are athletes and students participating in orientation programs.

The meal celebrates the start of preseason and the return of hang-out sessions across the various dining halls on campus.

My first friendships at Brown, those with my teammates, were built through hours of conversation at the V-dub, sitting around a circular table after a long day of field hockey. Sometimes the only energy we had we poured into fueling our bodies for the next day. The only sound was the clink of utensils against bowls and plates, the thud of a cup against the wooden surface.

Other times we rehashed the day and discussed what we were looking forward to that semester.

Slowly, our meals came to revolve around conversations about classes, our likes and dislikes, our hopes and goals both short-term and long-term. The depth of our meal conversations did not happen overnight, nor did we realize the strength of our friendship until the end of the semester when finals hit and free time became limited. As I sat in the absolute quiet room of the Rock late one night, I experienced a profound sense of loss. I had been too busy to meet up with friends for meals and instead had eaten

Continued from page 30 identity is constructed.

You are scared. You are utterly scared. You aren’t allowed to be anything but heterosexual.

This was never part of the plan. How would you navigate life with this clandestine identity?

How would you respond to your conservative friends’ slurs and jokes? How would you respond to aggressors, especially if they are family? Your head spins everyday for an answer. You make a pact with yourself to put on a perfect show of concealment. You watch your words, your steps, your posture and your breathing. Your clothes could speak too much, and your laughter could give it away. You are self-conscious, and they?

That is the question you want an answer to but could never ask.

You decide that you have had enough. You decide that you need to break out of this shell.

It has been too long since any light visited your

Voices of 2017

By Jaclyn Torres

alone while analyzing a text or writing a paper.

A few weeks later, I felt whole again. Three teammates and I sat around a circular table discussing what transpired over winter break. To a stranger, our conversation would have seemed mundane — the classic retelling of the day, discussion of the time spent apart — but I soaked in every detail, refusing to part with the stories that I lived through vicariously. It was in that moment that I understood the importance of sharing a meal with friends.

I cherish meals with friends both for the ver-

bal and the nonverbal conversation. Most days, a simple glance or a comical people-watching moment prompts a fit of laughter in my friends and me that only subsides after a serious ab workout and tears running down our cheeks. Sometimes, meals soothe the frustration of a poor grade or a tense relationship. It is simply having someone to sit next to you and spend time with you that makes the dining experience worth it.

More than through just the content of the conversation, I have come to understand the nuances of my friends’ personalities through dining with them. A meal can reveal a person’s sense of adventure or how they handle stress; it can bring to light their degree of introversion or extroversion. Some of the traits might be considered extraneous to knowing a person, like the fact that one of my friends is obsessed with olives and will eat them with anything, and another has a penchant for pairing cereal with ice cream or peanut butter depending on the day.

These little preferences are important to me and make for an unforgettable meal.

My four years at Brown were shaped by mealtime. Every day was a new experience, and every meal provided me with comfort, hope and refuge. I am going to deeply miss the long conversations over dining-hall meals, but I will always have my friends to reminisce on those memories with me and create new ones in the next place I call home.

cell, like the day when you first left home for Brown and light filled up your room, feeding you with warmth and strength for this journey you then embarked on. You need that again in your life. You speak up. One day after the next, you untie the knots that have bound you for so long. One after another, your true friends filter through the funnel. You are self-conscious, but they embrace you and tell you that you are loved and protected. It will be an ongoing struggle, but you have taken the first step.

You have fallen in love with what you study.

Books pile up high on your desk as you read about subjects that would have been too bizarre to even cross your mind just a few years ago. You spend days and nights with your eyes half open (or half closed) in the Rock, pounding keys on the qwerty board until a single more glance at your thesis hurts your eyes. The day you give your thesis presentation you are a little self-conscious, but they applaud and cheer you on.

Four years after arriving, I am dressed in regalia at Commencement.

Four years after arriving, I become the first college graduate in my family.

Four years after arriving, the barrier called culture has decreased in magnitude.

Four years after arriving, I sometimes stutter in my native tongue and am more eloquent in this foreign one.

Four years after arriving, I no longer envy my neighbor’s new phone.

Four years after arriving, I realize being who I am is the source of my strength.

Four years after arriving, I still don’t know what the future holds.

Four years after arriving, I am writing for the Commencement Magazine, and I do not know how to write the ending.

Four years after arriving, I realize I do not have to write any ending, for what I have is enough.

COMMENCEMENT 2017

29

Voices of 2017

You Are A Little Self-Conscious

By Jia-hong Sun

The not-so-fictitious portrait of an international, first-generation, low-income, queer student at Brown University You bend down to tie your laces. You think the shoes are funny-looking. They are made of cowhide, and you have never worn ones like these before. You are traveling to America! Better wear something nice! You giggle at their old-fashioned ideas.

You stand up and twist the door knob. Light cascades into the room you are about to leave.

You turn your head to the three of them. You say Ma, Grandma, Grandpa, bye for now. They say, best of luck in America, call us if you need money.

Your heart warms but then sinks. You are about to leave them behind to fly solo on this one-way trip across the Pacific Ocean, with a return ticket purchased only for an unknown point in the vastness of the future.

Yet this is not the time for tears. You pucker up the edges of your lips, wishing that their last image of you be your smiley creases. You close the door of the familiar Confucian East behind you, and you open another into the wild AngloProtestant West. In this prestigious, elite and freethinking institution that was not originally built for people like you, you will stop speaking the language you have known for your whole life, and you will adopt a foreign tongue to help yourself thrive.

After 24 hours, dragging along 100-pound bags and flying 6,800 miles, your eyes are blood-

shot. At the first mingling event, you meet some of your classmates — hundreds of them. They are busy getting to know each other, and you aren’t sure you even speak the same English as they do.

You manage to squeeze a sentence out, can I join your group? I don’t want to be left alone. You are a little self-conscious, and they just smile.

Language isn’t the true barrier. Culture is. It is a chiffon scarf softly covering your eyes. It is gentle and at times almost invisible. Yet its existence makes every decision slightly more effortful.

On your way to class, there is this three-story house with a vast backyard where little blond children throw balls at each other. On your way home after a late night at the Sci Li, there are these lights that keep every shop on Thayer Street illuminated at 2 a.m. On your food trips, there are the gigantic soda cups at Johnny Rockets and the humongous popcorn bags at Eastside Marketplace. You wonder why a family here needs such huge spaces when children in another neighborhood not far away play by the curb. You wonder if it is a waste of energy to keep buildings lit all night. You wonder if the food here makes you fat. You are a little concerned.

The new iPhone comes out, and it is all the buzz in your dorm. Neighbors jump up and down with their new toys, gathering together taking selfies. You also need a new phone; your

Homesickness Homesickness has plagued me for longer than I would like to admit. One of my only memories from pre-school is crying by the classroom door after my mom dropped me off for the day. Once my parents went back to Pennsylvania after visiting me during family weekend of my sophomore year of college, I got in my bed and sobbed.

During my first semester at Brown, I remember asking a junior who was in a group project with me when Brown would feel like home to me. “Around Thanksgiving break sophomore year,” she said. It was oddly specific and further off than I had anticipated, but I was hopeful and excited to develop some sort of place attachment to the university where I’d chosen to spend the

30 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

current one is in a sorry state. You are a little selfconscious as you listen to their laughter, and you swear that you will get one, too. You tutor algebra.

You watch people swim. You peel avocados at Andrew’s. You chop salads at Jo’s. At this rate, next year, perhaps, you will have a replacement, too. It’s the waiting that makes a possession more valuable. You tell yourself that that is true.

Before you came, you were indoctrinated with the idea that your place of origin makes you inferior in America. You were told that America is not the post-racial country it aspires to be. Heads pop out of a passing car on Hope Street and yell chink at you, and so that is confirmed. You shrug it off. You are only a visitor, and therefore you don’t count in their demographics, right? It is their ignorance anyway. You are self-conscious, but they just laugh and drive away.

You feel foreign, utterly foreign.

While you are working to get a new phone, something else bugs you, too. There are some knots at the center of your existence. They reside in the veins where your blood flows; in the muscles that move you around; in the nostrils where oxygen comes out and in; in the eyes where your tears secrete and gunk accumulates. Most importantly, they are in the brain where your

Continued on page 29

By Taneil Ruffin next four years of my life.

Thanksgiving came sophomore year and, indeed, some friends had begun referring to their dorm rooms as home. When friends would send me texts saying they were studying at home, I had gotten into the habit of replying, “Wait what?! Do you mean New Jersey or like Harkness?” For a lot of my peers, home now meant not only where they were from but also spaces at Brown. Not for me, though. I tried adding some Pinterest-recommended “homey” touches to my dorm room, but neither pictures of my family and high school friends nor the plant in my window sill that I named Buddy (RIP) could give me that meaningful connection with Brown that

many claimed to have. For me, home was still in Pennsylvania with my mom, dad and brother whom I continued to count on for a space where I could be myself.

But eventually the day came. When I said “home,” I meant Brown, not the blue and white house in Pennsylvania where I had grown up.

I first said it on Dec. 14, 2015. I remember the exact day because, naturally, I posted a photo on Instagram to commemorate the moment with a sappy yet witty caption, and also because it had been something I had wanted to feel for the past two and a half years.

Continued on page 28

OU T W I TH T H E OL D...

The Thayer Street establishments we’ve said goodbye to and welcomed over the last four years

Nice Slice

Skewers

Au Bon Pain

Asian Cafe

. . . I N WIT H T H E NEW

Korean Fried Chicken

Insomnia Cookies

Bajas Taqueria

Durk’s Bar-B-Q

By Chloe

BGood

UMelt

WORLD-CLASS EXECUTIVE EDUCATION AT BROWN Congratulations to our 2017 Graduates!

Executive Master’s degrees at Brown prepare you to lead your organization and transform your field, while building a powerful lifelong network of colleagues.

Executive Master’s Programs:

The results can be seen in the graduating classes of 2017- proven leaders who will impact their organizations and the world.

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IE Brown Executive MBA Healthcare Leadership Science and Technology Leadership

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The Cogut Center congratulates our graduating student fellows Graduate Students Wuming Chang — PhD, Italian Studies ▪ Megan McBride — PhD, Religious Studies Undergraduates

Victor Bramble — BA, Modern Culture and Media ▪ Ximena Carranza Risco — BA, Environmental Science Noah Fields — BA, Literary Arts ▪ Dolma Ombadykow — BA, Medical Humanities Joseph Zappa — BA, French Studies

and welcomes our Fellowship Holders in 2017-18 Brown Faculty Fellows

Tamara Chin — Comparative Literature Sharon Krause — Political Science Christine Montross — Psychiatry and Human Behavior Rebecca Nedostup — History Marc Perlman — Music Richard Rambuss — English Felipe Rojas Silva — Archaeology and the Ancient World

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows in the Humanities Lynnette Arnold — Anthropology/Swearer Center Nic John Ramos — Slavery and Justice/Africana Studies/Science & Technology Studies Theresa Warburton — American Studies/English Postdoctoral Fellows in International Humanities Hongwei Thorn Chen — Modern Culture and Media Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco — Archaeology and the Ancient World/Haffenreffer Museum Dora Ivanisevic — Religious Studies/Judaic Studies/Classics Luis Estrada Orozco — Hispanic Studies/Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Graduate Fellows

Rajeev Kadambi — Political Science Lakshmi Padmanabhan — Modern Culture and Media Michelle Rada — English Noga Rotem — Political Science

Undergraduate Fellows

Shannon Frampton — Africana Studies Iván Hofman — History Grace Monk — Comparative Literature Edward Tie — Science and Technology Studies The Cogut Center for the Humanities ● Box 1983 ● Brown University ● 401/863-6070 http://www.brown.edu/departments/humanities_center

S E N I O R S U RV E Y Which of the following drugs have you used for recreational purposes while at Brown?

What one word would you use to describe your Brown experience?

Alcohol 98.87% Marijuana 67.23% Tobacco 25.42% Cocaine 17.51% Psychedelic mushrooms 15.25% Amphetamines including prescription stimulants 12.43% Molly 11.3% LSD 9.6% Xanax 5.65% Ecstasy 4.52% Prescription painkillers 3.95% Other (opiates, PCP, etc.) 3.39% Heroin 0%

0

20

40

60

80

100

What do you consider your sexual orientation?

100 percent 92

20

CURRENTLY

60 40

The Herald’s unscientific survey was conducted online from April 11 to May 9. 304 seniors completed the survey, though not everyone responded to every question. The data was not adjusted for self-selection bias.

83 WHEN YOU STARTED AT BROWN

80

5 4

0 Heterosexual

Gay

9

3

Bisexual

36 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

2 0

2 1

Pansexual

Asexual

5

1

Queer

3 5 Questioning

S E N I O R S U RV E Y Where do you think your GPA falls compared to other graduating seniors?

Top quartile

12.81%

Second quartile

47.29% 39.9%

Third quartile Bottom quartile: 0%

While at Brown, how satisfied were you with the following?

(0 = very dissatisfied, 10 = very satisfied)

Tuition

% 3.9ther

15.12%

5.93

President Christina Paxson

Unsure

Advising

E

21.46% What are your plans following graduation?

59.51%

ent ym plo m

Gradua te s ch oo l

O

4.07 4.86

Meal plan

5.17 5.53

UCS Housing

5.79 6.23

DPS Libraries Providence

7.53 7.89

Teaching

7.55 7.91

Extracurricular activities Research opportunities

6.59 7.31

Your concentration

7.67

Your social life Your sex life

0

1

6.43 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

COMMENCEMENT 2017

37

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 2017!

From the Watson Institute and its affiliated Centers, Initiatives and Programs Africa Initiative

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Center for Contemporary South Asia

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

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