2022 Commencement Magazine

COMMENCEMENT MAGAZINE

Spring 2022

Brown University 2022

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By The Brown Daily Herald

Daniel Pipkin ’14 gives back & pays it forward

AS YOU LAUNCH INTO

THE FUTURE

A long-time Brown volunteer, Daniel has served on both the President’s Leadership Council and the Brown Annual Fund Young Leadership Council. In addition to donating each year since he graduated, he’s also earmarked money for Brown in his retirement plan.

“A Brown education is transformational. Exposure to that which is beyond you—things you didn’t know, experiences you hadn’t lived, people you hadn’t met—changes you for the better. Through the Brown experience, thousands of students on College Hill learn and share knowledge that expands their world. Brunonia slowly opens their apertures, and what is left is the bedrock upon which they build lives of ‘usefulness and reputation.’

Financial support of Brown, for me, is a sound investment in that change.”

– Daniel J. Pipkin ’14 You can follow in Daniel’s footsteps and support future Brown students with an estate gift—no matter what stage of life you’re in.

DON’T FORGET TO

LOOK BACK Office of Philanthropic Strategies and Planned Giving

Contact the Office of Philanthropic Strategies and Planned Giving at 401-863-9119 or Planned_Giving@brown.edu to discuss your options.

Congrats Class of 2022!

Best wishes from Brown's Office of Philanthropic Strategies and Planned Giving

Editors’ note:

a reflection on change and a sincere thank you

This year’s Commencement Magazine marks the end of our class’ collective journey through Brown, and more broadly, a world irrevocably transformed.

The class of 2022 was here when the pandemic first shuttered campus, sending us across the globe to Zoom into classes and happy hours from childhood bedrooms and remote locations at disparate hours of the day and night. We had experienced just enough of Brown at the time to define it in our minds in pre-pandemic terms, but we would never get the same experience back. It’s a small loss, relative to others the pandemic and other ongoing crises have wrought, yet an acute one nonetheless.

It’s also a sense of loss that we faced united as a class and as a campus, and one that we’ve begun to come out of this year as we recapture old traditions and forge new ones, as we share moments big and small together again in person.

And while each year The Herald’s Commencement Magazine collects the memories of the graduating class, this year’s issue seeks to capture in particular stories and reflections on change and renewal, a persisting determination to better a complex world and profound growth and community in spite of the upheaval that has distinguished our college years.

Through all of this, we at The Herald are grateful for our ability to uphold the traditions of this organization while molding the paper’s future. We’re grateful that we

could come together this year and make a home of our new office at 88 Benevolent, and we’re grateful for late nights spent in the newsroom in person again. Thank you to our staff, who have given innumerable hours and exhibited grace and devotion to each other and the news. Thank you to the seniors who shared their reflections for this magazine in columns and news stories alike. Thank you to Herald alums and mentors who have guided and supported us through this tumultuous time. And thank you to our readers, who have stuck with us and given us feedback to help us improve every day.

Our time at Brown has been marked by crisis and change. But the past few years have also put on display our continued community, compassion and hope for a more just and equitable world. This year’s magazine, though inevitably infused with a sense of strife, pays tribute to that community and growth through change. We hope that the memories and reflections in these pages resonate with you as they have with us.

—This editors’ note was written by The Herald’s 131st editorial board: Kayla Guo ’22.5, Henry Dawson ’22.5, Li Goldstein ’22, Emilija Sagaityte ’22, Kate Ok ’22, Emily Teng ’22 and Kamran King ’22

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

From left to right: Managing Editor Henry Dawson ’22.5, Senior Editor Emily Teng ’22, Editor-in-Chief Kayla Guo ’22.5, Managing Editor Li Goldstein ’22, Senior Editor Katherine Ok ’22, Senior Editor Emilija Sagaityte ’22 and Senior Editor Kamran King ’22.

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In this issue: 6

Timeline

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Senior Orators

Pelosi, Shaggy, Berkley to receive honorary degrees

18 22 26 30

Senior Voices ‘The new normal’: how remote learning shaped student accessibility, spurred academic innovation Funkifying the familiar: Orange Guava Passion comes full circle

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Athletes, coaches, administrators reflect on turbulent two years in Brown Athletics A different path: U. supports military-affiliated community members on a life of service outside the Van Wickle gates

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Q&A with EVP for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ‘91 MA’06 From pandemic virality to building a brand: Seniors ride the next wave of social media From Bears young and old: Brown freshmen and seniors reflect on campus culture At Brown, their tech startups took root: Seniors reflect on innovation in and beyond college

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Commencement

Editors

Kayla Guo Henry Dawson Li Goldstein Katherine Ok Kamran King Emily Teng Emilija Sagaityte

Designers

Neil Mehta Madeleine Cherr Brandon Wu Katherine Ok

Copy Editors Lily Lustig Catherine Healey Devan Paul

Cover Art

Remy Poisson

Reporters Alex Nadirashvili Nicholas Miller Claire Liu Anna Kim Declan Johnson Laura David Julia Vaz Katy Pickens

Headshot Photographer Victoria Yin

DANA RICHIE / HERALD

Spring 2022

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U. to pay tour guides $11 per hour in 2019

University to require sophomores to stay on meal plan

On 50th anniversary, alums reflect on Black U. suspends Buxton student walkout House

The Class of 2022

University to add Students criticize undergraduate certifi- University support for cates to curriculum Granoff dinner VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

Four Years in Herald Headlines

The Class of 2022’s time at Brown was full of breaking news. Through it all, The Herald worked to cover major moments in our reporting. Here are some of the Herald headlines that shaped our collective experiences at Brown.

2018-19 2019-20

RYAN RHEW / HERALD

victoria yin

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

UFB releases historic funding data since 2008-09, reveals over $1 million in accumulated budget surplus Meir ’99 departs on mission to International Space Station Women’s soccer wins league title, beats Penn in double overtime Watson implements new IAPA concentration

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International climate strike unfolds in Providence

Brown sells 90 percent of fossil fuel investments

Men’s track, field and cross country reinstated as varsity sports

ACCRIP recommends University divest from companies ‘facilitating human rights abuses in Palestine’

COVID-19 shuts down Brown study abroad programs

Brown to bring students back to campus for two out of three terms for 2020-21 academic year

University suspends Sigma Chi fraternity

University cancels in-person classes, moves to virtual learning

Ivy League canBrown Daily Herald cels sports due to plans to move after 50 COVID-19 years at 195 Angell Brown transitions 11 Street varsity teams to club status

‘This country is leaving me pretty lost for words’: Students from Brown participate in, support George Floyd protests

University reaches 90 percent COVID-19 vaccination rate Bagels return to Bagel Gourmet Students announce creation of Black Star Journal Updated Slavery & Justice Report Released

Hundreds of students protest ‘Untitled (Lamp/ administrative Bear)’ to be removed response to sexual from Brown’s cam- violence pus ‘over the coming Large social weeks’ Brown students regatherings among act to historic Biden Brown to fully fund U. students spark victory with quiet $10 million endow- controversy, calls to optimism ment for Providence action Public Schools Theta and KD Ivy League to allow chapters at Brown Ivy League plans for fifth year of varremain affiliated to to resume normal sity sport eligibility national chapters athletic competition in midst of panafter holding votes in fall demic Brown agrees to reinstate women’s equestrian, women’s fencing in proposed settlement

University awarded $2.4 million in CARES funding in April, will announce Brown community distribution plan in reacts to insurreccoming weeks tion at Capitol Brown community reflects on passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, future of SCOTUS

Public health leader Ashish Jha begins as dean of Brown University School of Public Health JACK WALKER / HERALD

2020-21 2021-22

Graduate Center Bar to reopen for first time since pandemic Brown evacuates students due to bomb threat

Environmental police remove deer from Morriss Hall ‘We’re in desperate need of help’: Understaffing, facilities issues stretch workers at Ratty, V-Dub

Dear Blueno confessions page unpubEast Side Mini-Mart lished by Facebook to close in “bittersweet” farewell as Women’s soccer University makes wins Ivy title after room for new dorm beating Penn

Men’s rugby beats Dartmouth, wins Ivy title for first time in 25 years

SGA to hold spring election runoff following candidate appeal

Women’s volleyball wins Ivy League title

Ashish Jha named next White House COVID-19 response coordinator

Women’s soccer completes perfect Ivy League season with 3-2 win over Yale

Louis restaurant reflects on 75 years, impact of COVID-19 University moves to optional masking, testing

Gail McCarthy, beloved Brown Dining ‘You just live from one Services cashier, moment to another’: retires Ukrainian students respond to ongoing Russia-Ukraine war

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Pelosi, Shaggy, Berkley to receive honorary degrees Pelosi to deliver Commencement oration

BY JULIA VAZ During Commencement and Reunion Weekend from May 27 to 29, President Christina Paxson P’19 will confer honorary degrees on nine distinguished leaders: Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott MPH’11, Dr. Seth Berkley ’78 MD’81, Guido Imbens MA’89 PhD’91, Stanley Nelson, Nancy Pelosi, Shaggy, Alice and Thomas Tisch ’76 P’18 P’20 and Zeynep Tüfekçi.

This year, Brown’s ceremony will be “oneof-a-kind,” according to a press release. Beyond celebrating the graduating class of 2022, the class of 2020, which could not experience an in-person Commencement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was also invited to join the ceremony.

On Saturday, May 28, Berkley will deliver the Baccalaureate address to the undergraduate class of 2022.

Berkley is the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Since 2011, Berkley has leveraged his expertise in epidemiology to improve vaccination access and advance equity in poor countries, vaccinating more than 888 million children and preventing more than 15 million future deaths in just over two decades. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Berkley co-created COVAX, a global multilateral initiative that, under the World Health Organization, supplies 92 countries with vaccines against the virus. Berkley will receive a Doctorate of Medical Science.

In 2007, Pelosi was the first woman elected to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Now in her fourth term as speaker, she is credited with helping craft the Affordable Care Act and the American Rescue Plan. Pelosi has also led efforts to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by creating the bipartisan

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Select Committee. For over more than three decades of service, Pelosi has advocated for workers’ and human rights, climate and democracy. In 2013, she entered the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Pelosi will receive a Doctorate of Laws.

Shaggy, also known as Orville Richard Burrell, is a two-time Grammy Award winning artist and the only diamond-selling dancehall artist in music history. Before selling more than 40 million album units, Shaggy served four years in the U.S. Marines. In 2009, he established the Shaggy Make a Difference Foundation, raising money and awareness to help those in need in his homeland of Jamaica and strengthen communities. Shaggy will receive a Doctorate of Fine Arts and will deliver the honorary degree oration for the class of 2020 Commencement ceremony.

Alexander-Scott is a physician and public health leader. She served as director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from 2015 to 2022.

During her time as director, Alexander-Scott focused on addressing the relationship between access to housing, education, employment and health quality. She also worked as an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the Brown’s Alpert Medical School. Alexander-Scott will receive a Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Imbens is a 2021 Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences. He was recognized for his role in “developing a methodology for analyzing causal relationships in the social sciences,” according to the press release. Imbens has published research in many economic journals, in addition to co-authoring the book “Causal Inference in Statistics, Social and Biomedical Sciences” and editing the academic magazine Econometrica. In 2017, Brown awarded him the Horace Mann Medal. He will receive a Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Nelson is an Oscar-nominated documentarian. A MacArthur Fellow, Nelson has received the Peabody Award, the National Humanities Medal and other awards. Nelson’s documentary “Attica” was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards. In 2000, in partnership with his wife, Nelson founded Firelight Media, a nonprofit focused on helping launch the careers of nonfiction filmmakers of color. Nelson will receive a Doctorate of Fine Arts.

Alice and Thomas Tisch have been Brown benefactors for decades. Their efforts have helped fund and support faculty research, student financial aid, professorships and more. Alice Tisch has served as a board member at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, beyond leading NYU Langone Medical Center’s pediatrics initiative, along with Thomas Tisch. He served as the University’s 20th Chancellor from 2007 to 2016 and was awarded the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal of Honor in 2019. They will receive Doctorates of Humane Letters.

Tüfekçi is a scholar and educator who explores the social impacts of technology. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science and a principal researcher at UNC’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life. As a columnist for The New York Times, she has analyzed the impacts of social media and algorithms and written extensively about the COVID-19 pandemic. Tüfekçi has also published a book, “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” on the relationship between the internet and social movements. Tüfekçi will receive a Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Commencement

Senior Orators: Michelle Liu ’22, Alexandra Ali Martinez ’22, Kaitlan Bui ’22, Sydney Lo ’20, Dhruv Singh ’19.5 Orators to speak on what it means to pause, grieve, find uplifting communities on campus

BY ALEX NADIRASHVILI During an average Thursday night dinner at the Ratty, Michelle Liu ’22 received an unexpected email that left her in shock. She had been chosen as one of the senior orators for the class of 2022, inviting her to join in a 254-year-old University tradition that allows select students to deliver speeches at Commencement.

Being selected is “such an honor,” Liu said.

“This is a beautiful moment to thank (the Brown community) for making me who I am and allowing me to grow alongside all these different, diverse, thoughtful, incredible (and) intelligent people.”

Liu will be joined by fellow orators Alexandra Ali Martinez ’22 and Kaitlan Bui ’22 in speaking on behalf of the class of 2022 at Commencement. ​​ Sydney Lo ’20 and Dhruv Singh ’19.5 will also deliver their speeches this year, representing the nearly one thousand members of the class of 2020 that the University will welcome back for an in-person graduation.

Lo knew immediately that she wanted to return to College Hill for Commencement. “There’s something so special about seeing people who have gone through so much with you,” she said. “When we all went away (in March), there wasn’t a chance to say goodbye and tie up all of our experiences.”

When Lo was first nominated to speak at Commencement in fall 2019, she was drawn to the topic of grief, after her brother’s passing during her sophomore year, and how Brown’s on-campus community helped her heal.

“I am incredibly grateful for the support I found at Brown,” Lo said. “It teaches you a lot to go through grief on a college campus, where there’s a level of anonymity. … I could have grieved alone, but that would have done a disservice to my brother and myself.”

Instead, Lo joined the on-campus Bereavement Group — run by the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life — which offers students who have suffered the loss of a loved one a place to gather. She also found support through the Swearer Center’s Bonner Community Fellowship program.

“I reached out and found support systems in

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my extracurriculars, and I was able to make a lot of those connections stronger,” Lo said. She learned how “to be vulnerable with other people and take the space (to grieve) when (she) needed it.”

Lo believes that the devastating loss associated with the pandemic over the past two years has only made her speech about grief more broadly applicable. Coming back to the speech nearly two years after it was originally drafted, Lo refocused her theme on healing, specifically “what it means to be alumni of Brown University in this changing world and what responsibilities we have to heal one another.”

“I hope that this speech is a chance for people to heal, feel love and be intentional about that,” Lo said. Healing “takes time and it takes practice, and that’s why we have communities: to learn how we can heal … (and) support the people that you want to support.”

Singh’s speech echoes Lo’s community angle, focusing on the difficulties he faced as a first-year at Brown before finding a welcoming community with the Brown Outdoor Leadership Training program.

“My first year at Brown was very hard, very isolating,” Singh said. “I thought I was going to transfer.”

It wasn’t until he joined BOLT that Singh was able to recognize and appreciate the self-motivation of Brown students.

Singh wrote his original speech in 2019 as a senior at Brown. Now, returning to writing as a professional speech-writer two years out of college, Singh has had to rediscover his voice.

The pandemic, paired with the “racial justice reckonings” of summer 2020, make the community element of Singh’s speech all the more resonant, he said, pointing to how Brown students took action to support Providence throughout COVID-19 by donating street outreach supplies.

“Seeing the ways that people sprung into action, not just for the people they knew, but the people they shared Brown with, that they shared Providence with,” was really important, Singh said.

“If nothing else, that year gave my speech a little more teeth. This isn’t just a kumbaya thing,” he added. “There’s a responsibility to the com-

munity. You have an obligation to the people you share your community with.”

Liu also aimed for resonance when drafting her speech, focusing on the “universal emotions” that the entire class of 2022 could relate to while simultaneously avoiding typical cliché themes.

Liu’s speech will focus on the importance of pausing and “why it’s really important to take time in your life to assess what you want to do and to make meaning out of your purpose,” she said. Coming out of the pandemic, and more generally living in “our go go go culture,” Liu said she wanted to remind people to live life for themselves and not just follow others.

“For me personally, pausing was super important because I came into Brown focused on statistics (and) computer science, really thinking I would pursue a degree in that field because of financial stability,” she said. “Throughout my time at Brown, I was able to be exposed to writing and sociology, and I realized what I want to do with the rest of my life is write.”

COVID-19 put everyone’s lives on pause, Liu said, forcing them to reflect on the lived experiences of those around them. She was particularly inspired by movements for racial equity that gained traction during the pandemic such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate.

“It’s easy to go blindly through life and to follow others and to conform to what we think we should do,” Liu said. But “nothing in life that is worth having is easy.”

As she finishes up her speech, Liu said she has been reflecting on how “bittersweet” it will be to graduate and leave behind the comfort she has found “with the community at Brown and the classes and even the geography of Providence.”

For Lo, coming back for Commencement and honoring her class’s experiences is a form of healing in itself. “I know that, personally, it would be really helpful and a good opportunity to reunite and put a close on this time in my life,” she said.

The class of 2020 “didn’t get to celebrate together as an enormous group,” Singh said.

“I’m just excited to be back in Providence and be around people who I love and never really got a chance to say goodbye to.”

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SENIOR VOICES Run your own race

Kimberly Collins ’22, Commencement speaker finalist Finding the words to adequately reflect on the beauty, triumph and at times difficulty of navigating this university is an exercise that is daunting yet necessary.

It is my hope that my own personal narrative and understanding of my Brown experience will guide you, uplift you and empower you. But if I am to leave you with one thing that encapsulates my time at Brown, it would be to run your own race.

As a first-year, I stepped into Brown unsure of what to expect. Sitting in Sayles during the Third World Transition Program, I had so many questions about how I would choose to spend my time on this campus and who I would be at the end of this four-year journey.

My entry into Brown was unprecedented for my family and coming from a public school where I sat in classes with a range of students — some whose families lived in homeless shelters and others in multimillion-dollar homes — I thought about my place in this world and what attending Brown was supposed to mean for my community

back home and for myself. Whose legacy am I building? What is my relation to this community?

Like many students of color at Brown, I struggled with imposter syndrome and accepting the fact that I was meant to be here. Never before had I been around people who were so smart, at an institution with so many resources and in spaces that made me feel so different. Then, there was this larger looming question: What does it mean to be Black at Brown? While I spent my first year in classes that weren’t super exciting to me, but fit the typical mold of other first-years, I soon realized that my time here would never be satisfying if I was fulfilling the expectations and dreams of everyone but myself.

There is no one way to be Black at Brown, excel at Brown, thrive at Brown.

Yet I would soon learn that there is one way to find your purpose, find yourself and find a life that crowds out all of the pressure from everyone else around you — and that is to run your own race.

By this, I mean not caring what others have to say about what you study, how you spend your time outside of the classroom or how you choose to be in community with others. It means disregarding those who question your pursuits. It means

holding tight to the things you know you can accomplish and living the life you were destined for.

It’s been a beautiful thing to watch people across varying communities at Brown pursue studies that differ from their parents’ desires, or dress in ways they know they cannot back at home, or lean into the talents that they never knew about. Those are the people that I have seen grow increasingly fulfilled here at Brown; those are the people choosing to run their own race.

As we have come to navigate a world drastically different from when we entered Brown, it is ever more important that the inclination to compare and beat ourselves up for not achieving imaginary baseline goals is erased.

When I finally came around to prioritizing my passions and genuine goals for myself, I found myself traveling across the deep South studying Black women in the Civil Rights Movement, co-founding an organization called Brown Votes (with Madison Mandell ’22.5) that would be awarded a $5,000 grant from President Christina Paxson P’19 and writing a thesis central to the issue that I want to dedicate my life to remedying — the hyper-criminalization of Black women and girls.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

What’s my purpose here?

Ryan Burnett ’22, Commencement speaker finalist Many students fondly remember their first moments on College Hill — meeting their first-year roommate, getting Jo’s at 12 a.m., taking pictures with our dearly departed Blueno.

But the only memory that has stuck with me is the image of my parents waving goodbye and fading over the horizon of Brown’s campus. As I watched their figures disappear, I wondered: What now?

What is my purpose here?

Over the thousands of other kids who fought and struggled to make it into these walls…

Why me?

As school started, I was quick to join every club I could and shop every class I had time for, to find a sense of belonging and purpose in the comfort of others.

I wanted the picturesque college experience that was advertised in TV and movies. I often say to myself that life gives us context for the art we consume. Quickly, I discovered that this idealistic, broad-brush view of college as four years full of

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fun and exploration is a myth — a beautiful lie sold to us all on the big screen. College is hard and sometimes painful. The long nights spent doing homework that I procrastinated. The walks through the Main Green wishing I had a group to sit and socialize with. The impending doom of graduation and trying to find a job to pay off student loans.

What I found, in the end, is that no one would truly ever understand me. Year by year passed, and through the many classes I took and the people I encountered here at Brown, I learned to walk on my own — to hold my own hand and not latch so desperately to the hands of others for warmth and acceptance. Gradually, I learned to be comfortable being alone, holding my own opinions, my own thoughts, even if it meant not having many friends.

My first real connection at Brown was with my English professor, Melinda Rabb. I would go to her office hours seeking guidance and answers for life’s greatest questions. And even though I wouldn’t find those answers there, she helped me see that I was living in a cycle: a constant loop of defining my self-worth through the acceptance of others. Now was my time to break free.

So why bring all this up now?

As graduates, we stand at a turning point

in our lives. Some of us are headed to California, others abroad and some are even just headed home. No matter where you go, I encourage you to take a risk, a leap of faith. Don’t allow yourself to disappear into the crowd. Stand out and think differently. Don’t allow yourself to be defined by friends or family. It is in these critical moments, when we are thrust into the arms of strangers, that we have the chance to define who we truly are.

There’s a great man in my life: my father, Russell Burnett. He has sacrificed and put his life on the altar so that his children could have all the opportunities and advantages in life. As I was getting ready to leave for Brown, he gave me a picture of my great grandparents. In tears, he talked about the sacrifices they made so that the family and my father could have a fresh start in this country after migrating from Barbados. He gave me that picture, and with it passed down the weight and responsibility of generations. All that power and obligation in the palm of my hand.

Every day since, I have carried the enormous weight of living up to that standard and being something greater. I’m sure many of you, as students and as individuals, can relate to the pressure placed on us all to be more. It’s an incredible CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

Commencement

What entrepreneurship means to me Elvia Perez ’22, Commencement speaker finalist A friend once told me that “the beauty in entrepreneurship lies in the simple reality that one is able to create something out of nothing.”

When I first arrived at Brown, it was this fundamental feature of entrepreneurship that drove me to immerse myself in the realm of social innovation and to use it as a catalyst for change in this world.

Entrepreneurship runs in my blood. I am a proud first-generation Mexican American. My upbringing has been characterized by humility and filled with adversity. Both my parents risked their lives crossing the border to come to this country, in hopes of providing me and my brother with a better life — one filled with opportunities unattainable in their home country. To me, they are the definition of entrepreneurship: They learned to create a new life for themselves in a country where they had no one and nothing to rely on.

They taught me how to stay resilient in the face of adversity, and they imbued in me the value of serving others and being grateful for life’s blessings

and challenges. And though I did not grow up with financial stability, my parents were able to provide me with one of the most important things any parent can give their child: unconditional love and support.

Growing up, I would hear stories about my parents running their own small businesses in Mexico City after first beginning to work in elementary school. They needed to support their families, and becoming entrepreneurs gave them each a sense of autonomy and independence. Mami ran a small juice shop and Papi managed a fruit stand with Abuelo. They took pride in their arduous labor. With little sleep, they would get up at the crack of dawn, determined to carve out a better path for their family. As Mami and Papi recounted endless stories of their childhood back home, I listened attentively, admiring their drive, strength and ambition.

My own entrepreneurial endeavor was different. Education became my passion, as my parents ingrained in me the notion that education was the path to a better life. This belief compelled me to create a small nonprofit when I was in high school, Latino Empowerment, which encourages Latinx students to pursue higher education by providing them with the resources — such as scholarships,

summer programs, and mentors — to do so. I worked to ensure that students in my high school and within my community were aware of the amazing opportunities that were available to them — opportunities often lacking visibility.

As I reflect, I consider myself lucky to have taken advantage of resources throughout my high school career — opportunities I largely learned about through word of mouth. But I strongly believe that students like myself should not have to get lucky in order to have access to higher quality education. That is why I created Latino Empowerment, and why I continue to feel passionately about innovation in education equity.

When I first arrived at Brown, I, like many students, spent my first night overwhelmed with an immense sense of excitement and fear. I marveled at the endless possibilities that could constitute the next four years, but I feared the uncertainty of what my future could hold and the responsibility that came with being admitted into a prestigious institution like Brown.

For me, getting accepted into Brown not only meant receiving a world-class education but so much more. As a proud member of the Undocumented, First-Generation, Low-Income CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

Expanding our universe

Edgar Villegas ’22, Commencement speaker finalist When I was young I remember looking up at the night sky and the stars that lay over it like white specks on a dark canvas while soft tones of mariachi danced in the background. One of these nights, I asked in gentle Spanish, “Papá, Mamá, qué son esas luces en el cielo? Si agarro una escalera gigante podré un día tocarlas?” which translates to “Mother, Father, what are those lights in the sky? If I grab a giant ladder would I be able to touch them one day?” It was a magical solution for a stellar dream. Like many of you, I arrived at Brown nervous, excited and a tad homesick. As freshmen we moved in constellations that would change and shift. We conversed in the dining hall about classes, roommates and the latest social events. How small our world was back then, oblivious to the obstacles and complexity that lay ahead of us.

During my time here at Brown, I learned of a 16th-century Italian philosopher named Giordano Bruno. Bruno was a Dominican monk who hungered to learn all about the universe,

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which in his time was simply thought of as “God’s creation.” He dared to read the books forbidden by the Catholic Church, the reigning source of power during his era. One book, written by an ancient Roman, Lucretius, fundamentally changed Bruno’s concept of the cosmos. Within the text, Lucretius offered a simple thought experiment in which a man stands at the edge of the universe and throws a javelin outward. Two solutions are possible, he argued: either the javelin continues on forever or the javelin hits a new boundary. If the latter is the case, then the rest of the universe must lie beyond it. The man could then go onto the new boundary and throw another javelin from there and so on, and so on. In either scenario, Lucretius concluded that the universe was endless, and hence, Bruno’s god was infinite.

With this newfound way of thinking, he dared to go further than Copernicus and argued that the universe had no up, no down, no edge, no center. More profoundly, he insisted that the sun was one of many stars, each with its own unique subset of planets and moons. Bruno’s innumerable worlds theory expanded the size and complexity of the universe tenfold. Of course we know now that Bruno’s vision was indeed correct — what a magical solution for such a stellar dream.

As a graduate of the class of 2022, it is imperative to think about how much your field of knowledge, your ability to create change and the size of your universe has changed since arriving on College Hill. As we don our gowns, crown our heads with caps and move beyond the Van Wickle Gates, we must dare to further expand our universe.

Dare to admire the nights teeming with stars And paint the unknown landscapes of Mars Dare to imagine yourself floating amongst the waves of light And picture yourself gliding to places light-years in height Dare to dream of new stories, glistening horizons And imagine the intricate sounds within the silence Dare to close your eyes, and decipher reality And then open them up to share with CONTINUED ON PAGE 15

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The truth about icebreakers Rahma Ibrahim ’22

“Before we begin, let us have each person introduce themself. Share your year, concentration, where you are from and a fun fact.”

Hi, I’m Rahma — class of ’22; I concentrate in Biology and Public Health; I am from New York City, and my fun fact is that I actually enjoy icebreakers, despite the anxiety they can induce.

For the past four years, many of my interactions within and beyond the classroom have begun with answering icebreaker questions, sharing my class year and concentration with peers and listening to them as they do the same.

This exercise is not unique to my college experience, of course; chances are you have introduced yourself countless times through icebreakers as well. At least for me though, icebreakers always felt tedious — a logistical component of a class or gathering that was hardly a meaningful use of time.

But over many years of participating in these activities, I have recognized that icebreakers represent more than awkward introductions. They are a privilege.

I know this from experience as a Muslim-American woman. My intersectional identities are attached to many stereotypes, so icebreakers give me the opportunity to introduce myself instead of having people rely on a sphere of false assumptions.

If you asked me to introduce myself, you would learn that I am an avid science-fiction/ fantasy fan who has watched “The Lord of the

Rings” trilogy many more times than my siblings have liked. You would learn that I am a visual person who color-codes my notes and pays special attention to matching the colors in my outfits.

You would learn that I am an aspiring physician who developed an understanding of the value of service from the sacrifices my parents continually make, whether for my siblings and me or for their patients. My introduction would reveal that who I am is quite different from what your assumptions may lead you to believe.

The idea that things are more complex than they appear is one that was ingrained throughout my journey at Brown. From my very first semester of college, in my introductory chemistry course, Professor Matthew Zimmt stressed that definitive statements could not even be made about subatomic particles. Even the model that we used to simplify the quantum mechanics underlying these particles felt surprisingly complex and nuanced. In my public health courses, professors emphasized that health is influenced by more than just medical care and that there is value in a holistic approach that considers the social determinants of health. When I co-hosted The COVID Pod with Dr. Ashish Jha and three fellow members of The Brown Daily Herald, we moved beyond simple labels like “anti-vaxxer” to discuss the complex reality of people’s health choices.

From electrons to health, there is always more complexity than is immediately apparent.

Even the tiniest of subatomic particles cannot be easily described, and health and health choices are shaped by myriad factors. Imagine what is missed when we minimize people to our assumptions of them. When we allow people to introduce themselves, we grant them agency over how they

present their identities and we get to learn about the multidimensional, unique individuals that they are. Not doing so might lead to a missed opportunity to truly get to know someone and form that genuine connection.

That agency is vital to the strength of the intellectual community Brown strives for. My identity’s presence in my education, even at a basic level, gave me a feeling of community and belonging. This was especially the case during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when all of my courses took place on Zoom. Suddenly, everyone in the meeting had access to arguably the most essential part of a person’s identity in the bottom left corner of a box on the screen. As someone with a regularly mispronounced name (“Rahma” is an Arabic word that translates to “mercy”), the presence of my name helped my classmates better address me, referring to the spelling on the screen to pronounce my name more accurately, or even just attempt to address me using it. Hearing the language change from “as was previously mentioned” to “as Rahma mentioned” made a big difference. Having just my name — only a single component of my identity — actively present in my education made me feel like a member of a community, rather than just a member of a class. I believe the value of simply addressing people by their name is a testament to the genuine connections that can be formed when we allow others to introduce themselves.

Through years of icebreaker activities, I have recognized that if we take the time to allow people to introduce themselves, we can form bonds with those who are more similar to us than we might think. Being able to introduce ourselves in social settings and classes, while sometimes awkward, is truly a privilege.

PEREZ – FROM PAGE 11 community, being on Brown’s campus made me feel, at times, like I was carrying the weight of my community on my shoulders. I was representing young people who had come from humble beginnings and faced great obstacles in accessing higher education — students, who despite their ample aptitude, had to work part-time minimum wage jobs to support their families. Students, who, regardless of their capacity to succeed at an Ivy League institution, had to help take care of their loved ones instead. I carried with me the belief that with this newfound privilege, I had the great responsibility to serve others — especially those who did not have access to the same resources, support and opportunities that I did.

I like to believe that success is not measured by accolades, achievements, status or wealth.

Rather, success is measured by the impact you have on others. It is through showing empathy and helping those in need that we can genuinely make a difference in this world and work collectively to improve the quality of people’s lives.

On that first day, I wrote a journal entry in which I listed my goals for my four years at Brown.

I was eager to do everything in my power to ensure I was taking advantage of every opportunity here on campus. One of my biggest goals was to create something that was going to help improve the

lives of students. Before coming to Brown, I had a preconceived notion as to what an entrepreneur looked like, and I did not feel like I fit that description. So I never even considered becoming an entrepreneur or creating a venture until I took ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations” with Professor Hazeltine and Professor Chaltas. To say these professors changed my life is an understatement; they transformed the trajectory of my career and my ambitions.

In ENGN 90, I learned about entrepreneurship by diving into Harvard Business School cases and reading about innovative, diverse entrepreneurs doing incredible things to change the world. This inspired me to see that someone like me, who came from a less privileged background, had the potential to become an entrepreneur and create something out of nothing. I realized the highlight of my high school career, founding Latino Empowerment, was a form of entrepreneurship that I knew I wanted to continue pursuing at Brown.

In addition to taking ENGN 90, I probed through the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship’s website, and soon I came across Professor Danny Warshay’s video on bottom-up research. I began to take notes and quickly realized that my passion at Brown lay here: where entrepreneurship and social innovation merge to create tangible change. It was

at this moment that I fell in love with the idea of dedicating my four years at Brown to entrepreneurship, with the hope of creating a venture that would go on to address and mitigate the educational inequalities that are so pervasive in our society — a venture that would go on to change and improve the quality of people’s lives. My belief in my capability to be an entrepreneur was affirmed when in my junior year, I placed third in the Brown Venture Prize competition — becoming one of the first Latinas to place in the BVP since its inception. I know there will be more of us to come. In my final semester at Brown, I took ENGN 1010: “The Entrepreneurial Process,” taught by Professor Warshay — whose video inspired my entrepreneurship journey at Brown, and who now brings that journey to a close.

As we look at our time beyond College Hill, I believe we must proactively seek ways to use our voice and power to address some of the world’s most pressing inequities. We must use our talents and ability to create something out of nothing to address disparities in health, wealth and education, and to remove barriers that prevent people from succeeding in this world. And finally, we as future Brown alumni must seek to build community, rekindle hope and find the courage to go where we are needed. For it is our passion for changing the world that ignites our essence and creates our purpose.

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Commencement

Learning to read Clara Gutman Argemí ’22

This winter break was my last time home as a college student and my first time holding an American phone number in Spain.

More than needing to be available to my classmates on College Hill, my 401 number signified a transition that would have seemed insurmountable to my first-year self.

Three years prior, the day before my first reading period, my first-year seminar professor brought his wife’s homemade scones to class and asked me what path I wanted to take during my time at Brown. I nibbled on a scone, my mind set on going home for Christmas, and said I wasn’t exactly sure. He advised me to read a lot, and to learn to read well. So, with unironic diligence, I checked the “Odyssey” out of the Rock and read it over winter break.

But honing academic literacy — learning to master the “Odyssey,” say — is only one part of adapting to Brown. Interpersonal literacy is a form of reading in its own right: reading and understanding each other, and the customs and contexts that shape us. This process of learning to “read the room” is a universal one among incoming first-years, but a uniquely challenging one for international students.

The process of transitioning from Terrassa, Catalonia to Brown (and, more broadly, to the States) has meant gradually improving my ability to read the cultures I’m in. I wish my first-year self could understand that that process doesn’t really end.

I’ll start where the process began.

As a distraction from homesickness, other international students and I gleefully bemoaned the Fahrenheit scale and the horror of not being

able to drink good beer for another three years.

They identified with me as I explained that, when my editor at The Brown Daily Herald asked me to cover a panhandling bill for my first story, I had to ask her what “bill” and “ACLU” meant. Gradually, those things stopped tripping me up.

Adapting to Brown comes with its own particular set of stumbling blocks for each student.

To a large extent, joining The Herald helped me understand this because it taught me to read other students’ experiences at Brown. Unfortunately, I learned how to do so most acutely while covering student life during the pandemic.

On the night of March 12, 2020, The Herald’s staff convened for the last time at our former office at 195 Angell St., putting together a paper whose front page read “University Suspends Classes” across five columns and joking about being foreign correspondents back in our home communities. As we vowed to publish enough to keep The Herald “daily,” I worried about which stories would fall through the cracks in the effort to do so.

The pandemic shone a light on preexisting disparities in students’ home lives and communities. Someone’s Zoom background featured loud family members, someone else’s was quiet; for some it was daytime, for some it was night; some had spotless Internet connections, some barely had a connection at all.

The more time I spent as a reporter and editor covering students’ experiences with the pandemic, as well as the administration’s decision-making processes in responding to them, the more I learned about what it means to be a student navigating the transition between home and Brown, pandemic or not. My work at The Herald, especially as an interviewer, taught me how to read — and tell — someone else’s experience on their own terms.

In order to tell an accurate, compelling story about a person’s lived experience, I’ve learned the

importance of paying careful attention to how they adopt, develop and use concepts to explain their position in the world. I explicitly developed this skill in my philosophy classes.

A friend and I recently joked over dinner about what we learned as philosophy concentrators. The meaning of life? Definitely not. How to hold a coherent conversation about concepts such as value, perception and truth functions? Perhaps.

Most concretely, we learned to read philosophy texts, which are often structured like a puzzle or a language game, and to respond to them.

But what often comes across in someone who studied philosophy, I think, is a specific ability to listen very intentionally to how their interlocutor uses language. As a philosophy concentrator, you learn to read how someone else thinks. It’s a tool that helped me gain a footing in a new culture, and ask better questions as an interviewer.

The path to literacy, in all of its forms, is non-linear and non-finite. Four years after I first picked up the “Odyssey,” I’ve learned to enjoy and deeply engage with academic texts that might have appeared meaningless to me when I first arrived. When I now return to what have become my favorites (still Spinoza, Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch), I know instinctively which passages I want to sink my teeth into, which concepts hold special value for that philosopher and which ideas connect meaningfully with larger debates. I can read layers into these texts in a way I couldn’t before.

I’m still not sure that I know how to read another Brown student’s experiences well enough to tell their full story, but I’ve improved my ability to do so. Nor can I fully read American culture — but I can define “bill” and “ACLU.” And, while I am not a Classics concentrator, I hope that if I picked up the “Odyssey” again I would read it better than I did as a first-year.

COLLINS – FROM PAGE 10 When I decided to run my own race, things fell into place. I enjoyed my existence at this university because I was choosing the classes, communities and extracurriculars that made me feel whole. Putting this trust in myself made me genuinely love who I was becoming and whom I am destined to be.

After years of sitting in classrooms and coffee shops next to some of the best performers, writers, coders and leaders I may ever get to know, it became evident to me that we will all lose so much of ourselves if our focus is solely outward instead of inward. While my self-criticism was grounded in real feelings of “otherness” that people of varying identities face, this critique took away from my self-discovery and realization that everything I was searching for was already within myself.

What I would soon learn was that my truths bring their own assets to any room I enter. That if I would focus on running my own race, I would be unstoppable — and we can all be unstoppable.

Yet even in moments when I have followed my heart and pursued opportunities that felt genuine and real to me, I did face many difficulties.

I’ve had to fight against people who wanted to steal my intellectual labor, fight for my professors to be more cognizant about race in our coursework, fight for people to see the humanity of Black women and just fight for a more equitable Brown. It’s been exhausting, to say the least. But while these were some of the greatest challenges for me to overcome, I was still running in the trajectory of my passions.

And in my corner have been my amazing parents echoing this same message. My dad repeatedly said to me, “Just be you.”

This simple but powerful statement is a call to see the value in everything you bring to the spaces you enter, regardless of the circumstances around you. Living in your truth will help make everything clear. It will answer those questions of what legacy you’re building and what your position is in this community and many others.

So, slowly those initial questions I started Brown with were answered. For me, to be Black at Brown, to be a part of a community built on legacy and love, is to run your own race.

Brown has given us the tools and experiences to run in the direction of our dreams. Now it is time to trust that they work. So, get to the starting

line of your lane, and begin your journey forward: unabashed, unapologetic and uniquely you.

Class of 2022, who will you be when you choose to run your own race?

Spring 2022

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The warmth of here Zander Blitzer ’22.5

Marina Keegan, a graduate of Yale’s class of 2012, wrote “The Opposite of Loneliness” as a senior column on the eve of her own graduation.

In a mere 940 words, Keegan poignantly captured the college experience: the excitement of leaving home, the trepidation of being on the precipice of adulthood, the fear of leaving behind a treasured community. She wrote about the things she wished she did or didn’t do, the insecurities that haunted her, the nagging sense that we are about to give up the best years of our lives. The sense of community she found at Yale, and the way she captured that feeling in writing, lit up in my brain like a lightbulb when I read it during my junior year of high school. Finding “the opposite of loneliness” would be my criteria for picking a school.

So off I went, visiting college after college, longing for that spark of recognition and always leaving a little disappointed and a little discouraged. There was no school where the angel choirs began to sing, I complained to my college

counselor. She told me to keep an open mind. So in the fall of my senior year, I took the Amtrak to Providence.

The girl I was visiting was a first-year, and it was two weeks into the semester. She barely knew how to get to the dining hall, much less answer all of my existential questions about Brown. But over the course of the night, as I met person after person, they all had the same magnetic energy. “Are you coming to Brown?” they’d ask. “It’s incredible, you have to come here,” they assured me. Rather than ignoring the random pre-frosh who was tagging along with them to the SV pool party (someone lent me an 18-year-old ID to get in), they earnestly engaged me in conversation, eager to answer my questions. Their kindness was palpable, and I was hooked. Maybe Brown was the place where I could find “the opposite of loneliness” after all.

And indeed, Brown has provided me with the opposite of loneliness — and more. Over the last four years, I have learned and lived and laughed and loved. I’ve pulled all nighters, I’ve napped in the sun on the Main Green, I’ve studiously avoided the SciLi and I’ve danced until my feet almost fell off. And the glue that binds all these experiences is feeling firmly, irrefutably part of a community.

But I’ve also realized that I don’t quite agree with Keegan. I don’t think the feeling I get at Brown is the opposite of loneliness, because so many things in college are, inherently, lonely. Sitting in the Rock stacks at 2 a.m. finishing a paper is lonely. Crying over your first heartbreak is lonely.

Wondering where people might be hanging out at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday is lonely. Loneliness and isolation abound, even when we refuse to acknowledge their existence. But I have come up with a phrase I think encapsulates the Brown experience: the warmth of here.

There is a specific type of coziness I feel at Brown, like the warmth of sinking into a bath.

Every time I come back to Providence after being away, there’s a comfort that seeps into my bones, soothing me. This warmth, of being together in community, is so rooted in this space, and I fear losing it as we move far away from Providence’s embrace.

To me, the feeling of community at Brown, which sustains and fuels us through our time here, isn’t just about the academic experience. Sure, we burrow in these small communities for love and companionship and comfort. But more than that, it’s about being together in this city and on CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

Learning to embrace uncertainty Catherine Healy ’22

I have never had a Plan.

I’m organized, sure; some might even consider me Type A. I make detailed itineraries for vacations and color-coded spreadsheets of which classes to take. I spend too much time composing emails, designing PowerPoints and arranging my bookshelves. I keep everything in my room in the same spot. But what I don’t have mapped out is a Plan with a capital P — a Plan for my life.

People like to ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Over the years, I’ve considered many different answers. A zookeeper, until I found out they have to shovel poop. A “wildlife specialist” who plays with tigers all day, until I learned that wasn’t a real thing. A doctor when I was watching “Scrubs,” until I remembered that thinking about what’s inside the human body makes me dizzy. An FBI agent while watching “The X Files,” until I realized I can’t do a single push-up. All the English major stereotypes, of course: lawyer, teacher, editor, translator, writer. I’ve imagined plenty of possible futures, some more feasible than others, many influenced by whatever TV show I was watching at the time. But I’ve never been sure about any of them, and the closer I get to actually growing up, the more uncertain I become.

Graduating high school was its own kind of uncertainty, trading the familiar faces and neat classrooms of the previous 12 years for the unknown. Back then college was an alien concept; I couldn’t fathom living in a dorm, taking only four

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classes, having the freedom to go where I pleased and spend all my money on crepes. In the end, though, it wasn’t such a radical change. Beneath the mystique, college was four more years of school; I’d still have homework and essays and discussion posts to reply to. I knew how to do all that.

College turned out to be better than high school in so many ways. It took some getting used to, but I found a rhythm: friends, extracurriculars, concentrations I cared about. Now that I wasn’t worried about getting into college, learning was fun again; the Open Curriculum let me pursue the subjects I loved — language and literature — while also forgetting how to do basic math. Soon enough, what had been outside my comfort zone was now within it. College Hill felt like home.

But four years went quickly, more so than usual with a good chunk of them spent on Zoom.

Now, suddenly, I’m here, teetering like all of you on the precipice of another graduation — “grown up” by most metrics, legal or otherwise. My future is no longer distant — it’s waiting just outside the Van Wickle Gates, impatiently tapping its foot. And even now, I don’t know what I want to be. I still don’t have a Plan.

This uncertainty is scarier than the post-high school kind. In fact, it’s paralyzing. It’s as if I’m staring into a void, psyching myself up to jump in.

School is what I know, and now it’s over; I don’t know how to be an adult, how to have a career, how to deal with insurance and taxes and — shudder — networking. I don’t even know where to start.

Imagining the possibilities feels less whimsical now, more urgent. We’re like boulders at the top of a hill, full of potential energy. If I roll the wrong way, there’s no going back. I’m scared that I’ll

settle, that I won’t find that mythical “calling,” that I won’t be fulfilled. But I’m also scared to try doing something I love, to take the leap and maybe crash and burn. It’s a pivotal moment in all our lives, and I have no idea what’s coming next.

I’m trying to start to lean into — maybe even accept — the uncertainty of it all.

It isn’t easy. It’s in our DNA to hate not knowing, not having a Plan — and we as Brown students have an even bigger problem with it.

Knowing is what we’re all about, doggedly asking questions and learning the answers by heart. We see uncertainty as a problem to be solved. But that might not have to be the case.

I’m trying to see uncertainty as an opportunity, as freedom, as a chance to explore without needing to define the course of my life. I’m trying to remember that life is longer than it feels, that in the scheme of things, this moment is not so much more important than any other. We can’t go back to the top of this hill, but there will be others; other choices to make, other ways to roll. Change is always possible; in fact, it’s guaranteed.

At the end of the fall 2020 semester, our first spent entirely on Zoom, my Satire and Humor Writing class had a Career Day. Our professor, Jon Readey, gave us this advice: Follow your dreams in your twenties, and get a real job in your thirties if it doesn’t work out. It’s a reassuring thought — maybe we don’t have to grow up just yet. Maybe, even after graduation, we can still imagine what we want to be someday, and that can change as often and as easily as it did when we were kids. Maybe we don’t need a Plan with a capital P. Life is a Choose Your Own Adventure; we just have to keep turning the page.

Commencement

Forging a path through disparate disciplines Savannah Doelfel ’22

​​We all are probably perceiving our Commencement day in different ways. Some of us may be happy or excited, others are nervous and melancholy and some are likely experiencing all these emotions at once. Over these past four years, we have learned how to better understand the perceptions of those around us. But Brown has also prepared us to expand our own perception of what is possible to be anything that we want.

I recently went through an experience reminding me firsthand that perception of the world around us is variable from person to person.

In my case, I have been living my whole life thinking that the way I stand and walk, skills that most take for granted, was considered normal — only to find out in college when I spoke to a physical therapist that my hips were not even in the correct position and my feet were not in the proper alignment.

I had no idea that there was even something wrong, because the way I lived and walked was tied to my perception of “normal.” I still played sports, walked to classes and did the things that the people with the so-called “normal” hips were doing. I never knew there was any other way to walk or stand, let alone that out of all of the options, mine was the incorrect one. There was never a comparison of what those around me were experiencing, because the way I walked was working for me and my life at the moment. I just knew that I moved a certain way and never realized that other people were not moving that same way themselves. Which begs the question: What does it even mean to perceive something

as normal?

Let’s start with the “normal” college experience as an example. There’s often a clear track that people are following with their classes, their extracurriculars, their friend groups. There are times when what we are doing in our own lives feels right to us when we are alone behind closed doors, but when we then speak with others about their lives, it may feel like what we are doing is actually incorrect. Maybe you have had an experience over the past few years where you felt like you were not participating in the right amount of clubs, or just frankly the wrong clubs. Or perhaps you took classes out of genuine interest but were concerned that they would have little practical use after graduation.

Now change your perception just a little bit.

What you learned from those random or obscure clubs can join together to give you a combination of skills that nobody else has had before, such as the ability to combine dance and environmental activism. Those classes you took with the intention to expand your mind might just bring you to a niche job or field of study that previously lacked visibility, but needs more trailblazers like you to help it reach its full potential. The world needs people that can see beyond the classic pathways of life and are willing to take a chance with their ideas, thoughts and dreams.

Brown is a stepping stone for embracing these types of uncharted territories and broadening our perception of what the future can look like. Even if nobody else perceives the same type of future you can imagine, you can still come back to our 10- or 20-year reunion explaining how you made that future happen. For example, before attending Brown, I had not been content to imagine myself in just one discipline. In elementary school, I used to tell people I wanted to be both a teacher and a rockstar. While I no longer plan to

sell my concert tickets during recess and be like a real life Hannah Montana, Brown has prepared me for a career that combines my multiple interests, however niche they may be. For me, that is by working at the intersection of neuroscience, law and medicine. Starting from freshman year, I would wake up and take Neurobiology one morning followed by American Politics the next day.

And there was the time in my History of Law class when I spoke about vaccine trials and medical ethics for my presentation on a “Great Trial,” as opposed to a classic courtroom case. I perceived seemingly disparate fields to be combined as one and went to work making that a reality. Now, I will be attending law school after graduation and plan to also apply to medical school to help bridge the gap between lawyers, doctors and scientists.

So no matter where you go after Brown, no matter what you do, take this perception with you.

The perception that what other people do is great for them, but has no bearing on your own personal journey, academic or otherwise. Over these past four years, college has afforded us the opportunity to find what is great for us. Now, moving forward, it is time to go find what is great for you. Yes, there are common ways to proceed after we leave here, and those are also great opportunities for making the world a bit better. But do not forget to think back to those little ideas that pop into your head from time to time that you silenced because you did not know how to make them feasible at that moment. Do not forget the aspirations you had that people thought were crazy and impossible. Maybe it was crazy and impossible in their perception of the world, but in yours… the opportunities are endless. So walk through those gates on graduation day and into the direction you want your life to take you, even if your hips are in a different position and your feet are in a different alignment than the person walking next to you.

VILLEGAS – FROM PAGE 11

Catholic Church in Italy, expelled by Calvinists in Switzerland and banished by the Lutherans in Germany. Eventually, he was invited to give a series of lectures at Oxford, which were met with high criticism. These critiques included being called a heretic, an infidel and a lunatic. Bruno’s will, however, would not bend to authority and for that he suffered a similar fate as other “heretics” of his time.

The truth is that expanding the collective field of view will often be met by resistance. Even if it is for the better, changing the flow of the mighty stream is ultimately a disruption of the status quo.

It is the fear of change that often causes the nights to flame with fire.

And yet, despite this fact, it is clear that our class is no stranger to change or the resistance to change. Every graduate has persevered through a pandemic, through the economic hardships that accompanied it and through shifting political paradigms. The students at Brown are patrons of change. We have rushed to the statehouse to protest racism and injustice, we have dedicated time to classrooms across the city of Providence, we have

engaged with undocumented workers, community organizations and non-profits. We have increased the pressure to improve diversity and inclusion within academic departments at Brown, and insisted on improving women’s rights and workers rights here on campus. What’s truly inspiring is that you have already been fighting to expand the boundaries of this campus’ universe. Our time as undergraduates was only our dawn; now, as we move into the broader world, we set ourselves to bringing the sunrise.

Our ability to sculpt the future depends on how expansive we desire our universe to be. It depends on how broadly we want our eyes to gaze upon the horizon. Therefore, let us not limit our ideas, our creativity, our compassion or our dedication. If we promise to do this then we can truly create magical solutions for stellar dreams. Where the magic may seep into the free thoughts of others and the dreams may grow from the stellar to the interstellar scale. Congratulations to the class of 2022 — I hope we will all continue to expand our universe and seek our ladders to the stars.

all of humanity Dare to see the mountain in every piece of stone And feel the strength in every one of your bones Dare to change the direction of the mighty stream And create magical solutions for stellar dreams As I think back to my ladder to the stars, I chuckle at the absurdity of it. Perhaps I, too, was already trying to increase the size of my universe.

So far we have spoken in poetry and envisioned with prose. But what is the legitimate cost of expansion? To answer this, let us look back at Bruno’s story. For preaching his gospel of infinity, Bruno was excommunicated from the

Spring 2022

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Careful attention Nicholas Fabrizio ’22

For as long as I can remember, my attention has escaped me. It has always been in a million places at once, split a million different ways. But at some point in my educational journey, I figured out how to direct it toward the standard markers of student achievement — academic excellence, extracurricular participation and the like — that had been mapped out before me. It was an impressive feat for me, a way of recovering what was mine — or so I thought.

In time, taking on so much ownership left me desperate for moments when I could just check out. Eventually, though, those moments of downtime that I craved so very much lost their magic. A nagging sense of responsibility sprouted into listlessness: I should be doing something else, impressing someone else, investing in some other future.

Evidently, something was missing. Not once had I asked myself a most critical question: What do I want? I thought for so long that what I wanted was informed by those around me, and I never could have conceived of finding within myself a true ambition. That changed over the four years I spent at Brown.

Brown, in all its freedom and rigor, asks its students to be explorers; in this quest of exploration is the opportunity for one to take radical responsibility for their life. In an environment in which everyone forges their own unique path, there was no longer a glaring model from which I could derive my inspiration or motivations or wants. For the first time, I was the architect of my own education. Perhaps most surprising was that embracing uncertainty in this process was not only acceptable but fundamental to learning how to learn. How very terrifying this was! In time, however, I formed a friendship with this feeling of fear — a meaningful step in taking ownership of my life, though I just did not know it at that time.

This process of accepting the unknown and looking inward eventually led me to the understanding that what I wanted was very much so before me or, perhaps, within me. Ironically, befriending my emotions afforded me a distance between myself and my thoughts. It was as if I now had my finger on the dial of my thoughts; through intention, I could turn down the noise of everyday

life. I didn’t appreciate this unfolding of awareness as it happened, but I certainly began to hear myself more and more. This transformation imbued in me a sense of agency that was entirely new to me.

Never before had I conceived responsibility as an inward operation.

A real quest for meaning began to burn within me, and what was most lovely was that I didn’t need to look far to discover it. The inquiry I engaged in over the past four years was not limited to academia. Almost every page in this most recent chapter of my life has been marked by the opportunity to dance with change: A learning environment rooted in exploration, the introspection that blossomed from the loneliness of the pandemic and a concert of human connections — both painful and extraordinary — each served as a mirror to a different part of myself.

Through privilege, pain and play I had the opportunity to better understand this world, this life. Learning about the fabric of our society, running the business arm of the publication I am now writing in and feeling all too much at the hands of others left me in awe of the reality in which we reside. For every fact, fiction or future I could wrap my head around at Brown, there are countless questions or concepts that remain entirely unanswerable — our purpose on this planet, the senselessness of love, what happens after we die. How much sweeter life is when we revel in this uncertainty. The truly bewitching mystery of the world almost begets an imperative: Indulge in wonder and abstain from incessant sense-making.

While attending Brown I gained a sense of wonder for this world that made me pause. In that pause, I gained perspective — a meta-awareness of the space that exists between a stimulus and response. This perspective granted me the freedom to observe my own thoughts — thinking about thinking became appreciably more powerful than thinking on its own. It’s a pleasure to investigate which of my thoughts or desires belong to me, and which I have unknowingly adopted from some other source.

Today, showing up for myself looks like giving myself permission to revel in the delights of daily life. Not long ago I would have found it hard to believe that a woolly cloud, a coconut Samoa or a moment’s worth of gratitude could constitute the best part of my day. But exploring and accepting the knowable and unknowable tenets of life on Earth provided me with the necessary frame of mind to arrive at an appreciation for the here and

now. It is this mindfulness that abates mindlessness, affording me the agency to dismantle the very illusions — fear of my own feelings, misguided narratives about what truly matters, a desire to control the natural unfolding of fate — that distract from the basic wonders of being. There is significant power in such a self-reinforcing system.

To Brown’s graduates, to the families and friends here to support them and to anyone else reading: I urge you to marvel at the ineffably vast mystery of this life as a means of taking it by the reins. A sense of awe does indeed provide the respite needed to see just a little bit more clearly — to stop, take a breath, look around and give yourself the space to simply be. This radical ownership can lead you to become exactly who you are, even if you don’t know who that is right now or if that continues to change as time unfolds. It will afford you the privilege to accept all of what you feel, and it will allow you to forgive yourself when you do not feel your best. It will coach you in the art of acquiescence, a reluctant acceptance of that which is outside your control, and provide you with the strength necessary to reorient yourself toward the best path forward.

The spiritual teacher and poet Dorothy Hunt tells us that “peace is this moment without thinking that it should be some other way, that you should feel some other thing, that your life should unfold according to your plans.” While I do not know for sure, I think that this peace is just about the most powerful state a human being can pursue.

In the space between thoughts and actuality, we find ourselves alive. It was in this space that for the first time in my life I found it so very easy to respect my emotions, accept this absurd reality and adopt a vision of myself as one small part of a dynamic world. I can find myself free not from discomfort but from the needless suffering that arises when I let misery overstay its welcome.

On such a momentous occasion, I write to assure you all — but mostly myself and this fickle memory of mine — that our lives do not begin or end with events like Convocation or Commencement. Enduring satisfaction cannot be plucked from the familiar markers of career success or romantic reward. The sense of flourishing that we all want so very badly begins when we dare to scrutinize the everyday; with careful attention, the familiar becomes profound, our lenses of perception widen and it becomes a hell of a lot easier to locate the transcendent liveliness that we need not look further than ourselves to find.

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

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Commencement

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

BURNETT – FROM PAGE 10 burden that influences and shapes our every action.

At the same time, growing up, because of the color of my skin, everyone would tell me how to act. They would say “Because you’re Black you have to dress like this… ” “You can’t listen to this music.”

“You can’t like white people.”

In every facet of my life, there are tremendous influences telling me who to be and how to act.

And to it all, I say: “No.” My purpose isn’t to please my father and it isn’t to disappear into a crowd. It’s to be the best Ryan Burnett I can be — to love myself and accept the man in the mirror despite all my flaws and shortcomings.

This photograph of my ancestors — at one

time a great weight that felt impossible to bear — is now a source of inspiration. I won’t run from the responsibility passed down onto me; rather I’ll fight, in my own way, to give my children a future where they are free to be who they truly are. I will break free from the cycle of finding self-worth in the acceptance of others. In my time here at Brown I learned how to truly be myself — to be more loving, more compassionate — but also became more aware that this is the only life I have. I have to spend it doing what matters to me and doing my best to inspire those that will come after.

I wish I could go back and redo it all. To see College Hill for the first time through the new eyes I have now. But the moment has passed, and time goes on. We march onward toward new challenges.

So, I encourage you all, no matter what stage of life you’re in, to hold your own hand.

Define yourself in the context of no one else but yourself and be reborn in the light of a brighter dawn.

BLITZER – FROM PAGE 14 this campus. It’s about running into someone on the Main Green who you haven’t seen in weeks and chatting with them. It’s the coffee dates, the post-class chit-chats, the walk to Jo’s after a long night. This feeling, this being part of something, is unquestionably tied to being together on Brown’s campus.

We lost so much of this during COVID. As we were sent away from campus during spring 2020, I felt like this distinctly Brown feeling — this warmth of here — was being pried out of my hands. FaceTimes and Zoom calls helped bridge the gap, but they weren’t enough. There was something that couldn’t be replicated, even as I met up with friends from school for socially distanced strolls.

Even in fall 2020, when I returned to Providence, it still wasn’t the same. Don’t get me wrong: I had so much fun that semester. I took leave from the University to intern and campaign, fueled by the importance of my work. I made homemade pizzas with my roommates in my Fox Point apartment, regularly roamed throughstrolled in India Point Park and even fell in love. But there was still something missing. I missed the random chats, the awkward run-ins, the 40-minute conversation you had in the Blue Room to avoid going to the library. I missed the warmth of here, which, to me, is intrinsically tied to participating in the life lived on Brown’s campus.

This is why it’s so scary to leave. Even armed with deep friendships, promises of weekly phone calls and BeReal, we will lose the warmth of here.

As we move to New York or Boston or Wash-

ington D.C., these places will never be Brown’s campus. We might live with friends from Brown or work with alumni from Brown or marry someone from Brown, but we will lose this elusive, fuzzy, soul-nourishing warmth of being together, of being here.

I’m an optimist, though. Even if we may never again have the warmth of here, I don’t think the rest of our lives are going to suck. It’s laughable to think that we’re already out of our prime. So we can look back on our Brown experience with love and gratitude, remembering all of these special moments. But going forward, we can and should try to find spaces that give us that same warm, bubble-bath feeling. Maybe the warmth of here can be found in multiple places, if we’re brave enough to look for it.

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COURTESY OF RYAN BURNETT

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The new normal:

How remote learning shaped student accessibility, spurred academic innovation

BY ALEX NADIRASHVILI As the threat of COVID-19 loomed over campus in March 2020 and University community members waited in anticipation for the inevitable email that would mandate their departure from campus, students, faculty and administrators were faced with a preeminent question: What could academics and remote learning look like in the context of a pandemic?

Courses — along with most other facets of everyday academic life — moved online, students were called back home from their study abroad programs and other learning opportunities dissipated as the world confronted an unprecedented health and economic crisis. Brunonians found themselves scattered across the globe.

“It’s incumbent on us, after all we’ve given up and lost, to think about how these innovations might help benefit us going forward.”

But just as the pandemic forced the University to adopt institutional changes to help make remote learning a reality, it also fostered opportunities for instructional innovation and expanded academic accessibility. When class materials and recordings had to become easily available virtually, for instance, disability justice advocates saw a years-long demand finally met — to the benefit, they said, of all students, disabled or not.

Two years later, many of the changes spurred initially by COVID-19 are here to stay. They are also now supplemented by new opportunities for

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experiential learning, or “collaborative, project-based and research experiences” — an area of Brown academics that has gained institutional priority coming out of the pandemic.

“What I love about Brown students is that they are intellectually curious, and they want to translate what they know into the world to try to make (it) a better place,” said Provost Richard Locke P’18. Throughout the pandemic, the University has been searching for ways “to create more of (experience-based) opportunities for people (to) learn by doing — not just by sitting passively in a classroom and being taught.”

The pandemic has redefined Brown’s academic landscape, with accessibility concerns and academic innovation now at the forefront of the University’s mission.

“It’s incumbent on us, after all we’ve given up and lost,” said Betsy Shimberg, senior associate dean of the College for co-curricular and experiential learning, “to think about how these innovations might help benefit us going forward.”

‘There were so many classes I was mentally checked out of ’: tackling the initial rigidity of online learning When the pandemic forced community members to vacate campus, many students faced both structural and personal barriers to picking up their lives and moving away from College Hill — challenges that were compounded for marginalized and disabled students, as well as students who were low-income, dealing with mental illness or lacking a safe home outside of Brown, according to Evan Dong ’22.

In addition to institutional concerns related to online learning, future academic calendars and more, the University had to ask “what is expected of and reasonable to ask from these students,” Dong said.

Because of the pandemic, Dong said conversations about disabilities, accommodations and accessibility in academic spaces became “much

more salient.”

For many students with disabilities, trying to function in an isolated remote learning environment was “detrimental to their mental health,” said Anna Ohrt ’23, who is currently transitioning into a leadership position within Disability Justice at Brown.

Director of Student Accessibility Services Karen Andrews found that in universities across the nation, students were struggling with the initial rigidity of online learning, including the physical

“What is expected of and reasonable to ask from these students?” demands of staying on camera all day and distractions that come with Zooming in from multi-generational households.

No matter where students were learning from, “everybody was at home,” added Assistant Director of SAS Desirae Mix. There were “lots of distractions in terms of being on WiFi at the same time, or trying to find a quiet space to pay attention to your lecture.”

For Aleena del Rosario ’23.5, e-board member of Project Let’s Erase The Stigma, participation was the biggest struggle when it came to remote learning. “I was not participating, I was not engaged,” she said. Due to mental health reasons, del Rosario found that she couldn’t stay awake for online classes that were two and a half hours long.

“There were so many classes that I was mentally checked out of,” she added.

The challenges of learning in unaccommodating academic spaces, laid bare by the pandemic, impacted all students.

When students that were normally accommodated in a physical classroom setting suddenly

Commencement

DANIELLE EMERSON / HERALD

found themselves in an unfamiliar learning environment, Dong said, conversations about accessibility were “brought to the mainstream.”

Administrators, faculty and students began to reconsider how Brown’s academic environments could be transformed to be made “inclusive for everybody,” Andrews said. By “seeing disability as part of diversity and rolling that into diversity discussions, … we were able to overcome some of the hurdles of working on campus.”

Student groups including Project LETS and Disability Justice at Brown began pushing for accessibility initiatives that would address rising concerns over students’ transformed academic experiences. These organizations advocated for implementing a universal pass grading system — in which all students would have received a grade of “Pass” or “Pass with Distinction” in their fall 2020 courses — captioning Zoom meetings, making recorded lectures available and greater flexibility from faculty, according to Ohrt.

“Having remote options is something that disability justice advocates have been fighting for for years,” she added. “A lot of people with disabilities really benefit from being able to do work from home, not having to physically go to lectures and having recordings available. … There were huge strides in accessibility.”

The University readily met many of these student demands, specifically in the realm of technical infrastructure. For the past two academic years, students have largely been able to attend courses virtually, recorded lectures have been made available and lecture transcripts and slides were often posted online, Dong said. When students were first sent home in 2020, the University also allowed students to change their grading options to S/NC after the initial deadline had already passed.

Moreover, in recognizing financial and mobility barriers students faced, the University provided financial assistance to some students leaving campus and E-Gap Funds to cover technology and internet service needs, among other funds.

Spring 2022

Being ‘intentional’ about teaching: faculty reflect on instruction methods While some of these changes were institutional, faculty members played a major role in normalizing the increasing accessibility accommodations needed in their individual classrooms. Speaking anecdotally, Dong found that many instructors became more relaxed with grading and attendance, being far more willing to trust students and not pry when personal issues got in the way of academics.

Faculty “had a lot more empathy for students because they were all” going through the pandemic together, Mix said. The pandemic jump-started conversations “about how accessible their curriculum was and (how accessible it) could be.”

“It was time for instructors to step back and be intentional about their teaching.”

Over the past two years, The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning has actively engaged in equipping faculty members with the necessary resources to deal with online learning and greater student needs, according to Mary Wright, executive director of the center.

During the 2021-22 academic year, the center collaborated with over half of Brown’s non-medical faculty, a quarter of the undergraduate population and about a third of the graduate students to develop “very personalized ways of supporting” academics, Wright said.

In spring 2020, the center surveyed Brown instructors about what aspects of remote learning they most needed help with, Wright said. Based on the results of this survey, the center worked to help individual faculty members with moving course resources to a digital format, translating courses to a fully online and asynchronous format and developing new assessment methods.

“It was time for instructors to step back and be intentional about their teaching,” Wright said. It was time to reflect and ask: “Are there better ways to achieve the learning objectives that I have for my students?”

Through its Anchor Course Design Institute, the Sheridan Center also helped faculty members develop new techniques to build online communities as students took their courses from all over the world.

‘Access benefits everyone’: how the pandemic forced academic innovation With these changes in place and a commitment to finding new opportunities for accessibility, students at Brown were offered ways to engage with their academics in an entirely new fashion.

“For a lot of students who prefer to access (courses) remotely and watch recordings, (the pandemic) opens up the whole world of academia to them,” Ohrt said. Before the pandemic, “it had been extremely challenging for (those) students to participate in the academic experience.”

Addressing barriers that weren’t previously considered on a broader scale, such as mobility challenges, expanded opportunities for all academic participants, disabled or not. Because of the pandemic, for instance, it became normal for guest speakers to come to lectures, students were able to work with professors who were traveling and virtual conference attendance became a norm.

Students could engage in their fields of study more readily with greater access to resources across the country.

“Being able to reach a broader academic

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space … has been really cool,” Dong said. “Access benefits everyone.”

The constraints of the pandemic have further engendered a broader recognition that “disability provides opportunities for innovation,” Andrews said. New technologies were developed “out of necessity, … (but now) we can open it up so more and more students have opportunities.”

One of the ways the pandemic encouraged innovation beyond the typical academic setting is through its effects on the University’s experiential learning offerings: research, internship and inthe-field opportunities that take place alongside standard curricular academics.

When the pandemic hit, students who were participating in experiential learning programs were cut off from many of the communities with which they had been engaging.

“That meant that there were people in Providence who could not receive those services,” Shimberg said.

On-campus centers like the Swearer Center for Public Service and the CareerLAB came together to supplement these lost opportunities by establishing the Summer Projects for Research, Internships and Teaching Awards program, which turned to the community for projects students could engage in.

The SPRINT program also marked an important shift in terms of accessibility, according to Shimberg. Before the pandemic, similar internship and research programs would automatically favor students who had built necessary connections and had networks available to them, she said. But because any student can apply to a SPRINT opportunity directly, the applicant pool “has increased enormously and changed from a diversity point of view.”

The University invested heavily in the SPRINT program, according to Locke. One of the main priorities when developing the program was ensuring funding to make the available stipends adequate and competitive, which Locke said increased the participation of first-generation, low-income students in experiential learning opportunities.

In addition, in fall 2021, the Swearer Center’s existing Engaged Scholars Program — in which students worked directly with community partners while taking guided coursework — transitioned into an Engaged Scholars undergraduate certificate. This opened the program to students in every department across the University.

According to Julie Plaut, director of engaged scholarship in the Swearer Center, this helped expand interdisciplinary discussions in the space of experiential learning.

‘Learning doesn’t need to just happen on campus’: how experiential learning has embraced existing accessibility needs The pandemic proved to the University that there was student interest in experiential learning, according to Locke. “We saw students that were living off-campus choose to (participate in forms of ) experiential learning” on their own, Locke said. As a result, administrators at the University asked themselves, “How do we create more opportunities for students? And how do we structure them so students don’t have to do that on their own?” he added.

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Shimberg noted that while students are interested in experiential learning — because it allows them to build social networks before graduating, try out careers and work on complex, real-world issues — many are afraid of pursuing these opportunities because of the time they already lost on campus as a result of the pandemic.

Fortunately, the pandemic highlighted that “learning doesn’t need to just happen on campus,” Shimberg said.

In summer 2021, Locke brought together the Experiential Learning Committee, which ultimately led to the development of the BE3 Brown programs — Berlin: Research and Entrepreneurship; Boston: BioTech and Life Sciences; and United States: Campaigns and Social Change.

These programs combine internship opportunities and coursework and allow students to gain direct field experience while continuing to complete their concentration requirements at Brown.

By connecting students to these mentorship opportunities while they remain enrolled at the University, “we can build out all of this access,” Shimberg said. “Students with demonstrated financial need can be provided with need-based financial aid for part of the cost of attendance.”

International students are also able to participate in the BE3 Brown programs because the internships “have been intentionally constructed in terms of time limits,” according to Shimberg.

During a typical academic semester, U.S. immigration regulations limit off-campus working hours for students who are studying in the U.S. on an F-1 visa to 20 hours per week, which aligns with the minimum expected working hours for BE3 internships, she added.

These new experiential learning initiatives more directly target accessibility issues that low-income students have traditionally faced, according to Locke. He added that low-income students were previously unable to participate in study away opportunities because their need-based financial aid packages did not follow them.

To address this discrepancy in access, the University began giving students the necessary funds “even if they weren’t on campus,” Locke said. The pandemic “taught us that if we really want our programs to be fully accessible, then the financial aid packages have to travel with the students.”

Having access to experiential education, internships and research opportunities also allows more students to be attractive hires following their undergraduate education, Locke said. These initiatives in experiential learning help level the differences in experience that can exist between low-income, first-generation students and middle- or upper-class students, he added.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re on campus (or) off-campus, whether you’re online or

in-person, synchronous or asynchronous, in this country or not,” Locke said. Experiential learning “creates opportunities for everyone.”

Elevating Brown’s open education ‘to a new level’ For disability justice advocates at the University, the biggest fear in the midst of a global transition out of the pandemic is a return to normal that entails “an active choice to exclude disabled people,” Dong said.

“The main thing with disability justice is we want to provide as many ways for students to participate in academia as possible,” Ohrt said.

“Continuing to provide these remote options allows students the opportunity to participate in academic experiences at Brown. Ideally, we want to make sure these opportunities remain available.”

“No one thinks we have to go back to where we were in 2019,” Locke said, “All of us are saying, ‘We learned a bunch of things … (now) how do we actually institutionalize this new knowledge?’”

Wright and the Sheridan Center are actively thinking about institutional resilience and how University programming can remain adaptable as the global health situation continues to fluctuate.

With the University returning to residential community learning, Wright is working with faculty to ensure that student pathways are accessible even if they’re studying remotely.

Wright likes to think that the University is shifting into “the new normal.”

The pandemic has given “us an opportunity to be aspirational, inspirational and transformational in what we do,” Andrews said. “Let’s take these lessons that we learned and turn them into something phenomenal.”

For Locke, the academic innovation spurred by the pandemic is central to Brown’s mission.

“These innovations, this combination of online, remote-accessible (academics) with experiential learning and financial support” are going to take Brown’s open education, Locke said, “to a new level.”

DANIELLE EMERSON / HERALD

Commencement

Funkifying the familiar:

Orange Guava Passion comes full circle

BY DECLAN JOHNSON Almost four years ago, nine first-year students — largely strangers at the time — formed a band to audition for the Gigs on the Green campus concert series. As an icebreaker, several of them wrote a song about Trader Joe’s.

Today, that song, “TJ,” has more than 400,000 streams on Spotify. On April 28, Orange Guava Passion returned to that same concert series and played “TJ” once more, this time as headliners.

The concert came as the second-to-last performance of the band’s three-year tenure as a mainstay of the campus music scene. In the more than 30 shows guitarist Maya Polsky ’22.5 estimates OGP has played for the Brown community, the band has graced stages from Fete Music Hall to 80’s-themed basement parties on Armstrong Street.

The eight-piece ensemble’s staying power on campus reflects its character as a quintessentially Brown band. Named after a juice offered in the Sharpe Refectory, Orange Guava Passion oozes Brown influence: youthfulness, idiosyncrasy and an aversion to the cardinal sin of taking oneself too seriously. Their lyrics fill the bingo card of things stereotypical liberal arts college students enjoy, from Subarus to Trader Joe’s. And, completing the final square, their lead singer, Jackson Jones ’22, met the other members over a game of spikeball on the Main Green.

But don’t let this air of goofiness fool you, said keyboardist Danny Silverston ’22.5.

“Take ‘Dino Disco,’” he said. “It’s an absolutely absurd song about this fantasy land where there are dinosaurs dancing at a disco party. But I do believe that musically, the song really holds up. I believe that making quality music that’s ridiculous might also be a very Brown notion.”

“Dino Disco” is one of six original songs released by OGP that have garnered over 1 million cumulative plays and more than 25,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In 2019, OGP released “Enjoy!,” a four-song EP. Since then, they have put out two singles: 2020’s “Eagletown,” which has over 600,000 plays on Spotify and, more recently, “Dino Disco.” All of the band’s songs reflect a heavy pop, jazz and disco influence. Jones, not one to shy away from vocal flair, nails plenty of falsettos to complement the syncopated guitar grooves, pogoing bass lines and grand choruses.

“The OGP way of arranging a song is having (drum) hits before a chorus in a very specific way,” said bassist Ben West ’22.5. “It’s a washy pre-chorus and a disco groove on the second chorus.”

This particular blend of influences is reminiscent of the band Lawrence, a popular soul-pop group that features seven Brown graduates and that signed to the label Capitol Records. Clyde Lawrence ’15, the band’s founding member, recently facilitated communication between a Japanese record label and OGP to potentially license OGP’s music for distribution in Japan.

Despite achieving a level of professional success not typical for college bands, OGP’s achievements hold little sway with their members.

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In conversation, Silverston is quick to demur, stating that though they have seen relatively large online success, “at the same time we’re a college band. It’s not that deep.”

“When we talk about having fun together or being happy together, it’s never about the big venues.

It’s always basement shows packed with people, and everyone is having a really good time” Instead, OGP is somewhat of an anomaly: a band with enough potential to license music in distant countries, but also one that derives much more pleasure from the moments they share onstage. Members of OGP assert that their main goal is to enjoy themselves during live performances.

“When we talk about having fun together or being happy together, it’s never about the big venues. It’s always basement shows packed with people, and everyone is having a really good time,” said West, who recently took to the Gigs on the Green stage in a knee-length purple parka, matching purple cowboy boots and no visible pants.

The band’s recorded music comes as a product of their live performances. All of their original songs were initially arranged for the stage, then cleaned up for the studio, Silverston said.

In rehearsals for the Gigs on the Green, their arrangement abilities shone. Described by drummer Wills Guggenheim ’22 as “the heart and soul and energy of the group,” Silverston led the band through a retooled version of Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On.” Perched cross-legged and barefooted on an amp, Silverston sang new riffs repeated by the horns and bass until the band came away with a funk-inspired take on a classic. The song fits right into the OGP’s typical setlist of crowd-pleasing pop music that West jokingly compared to “bar mitzvah music.”

What makes them unique, Silverton added, is the arrangement. Polsky described the trademark OGP style as “funkifying the familiar.”

OGP’s rehearsal dynamic is one reminiscent

of old drinking buddies: familiar, relaxed and punctuated by spills and laughter. This comes as no surprise for a band that has played together for such a long time. But it also reflects how music has kept a group of individuals who met during the indiscriminate friendship dash of freshman year together, even as they occupy very different sectors of campus, West said.

“People come from different backgrounds.

Some people (focus entirely on) music outside of this, (whereas) Eliot’s a CS genius,” Guggenheim said, referring to the band’s alto sax player Eliot Laidlaw ’22.5. “People definitely have their own things outside of OGP, but it’s really nice that it has stayed a consistent space.”

Now, the ensemble is winding down. Their final concert took place May 27 at Campus Dance. While some members are committed to pursuing music full-time post-graduation, others are going down different paths. West and Polsky are working on a side project aptly titled Polsky West. Silverston’s other band, Couch, has enjoyed considerable commercial success touring the East

“That was soulful.

You could tell there were a lot of emotions. But it was more joyful than sad.”

Coast. For the others, the end of OGP may be the last time they perform on stage.

For this reason, the mood of the crowd at Gigs on the Green was decidedly nostalgic. After Jones mentioned it was the last concert for trumpet player Peter Sage ’24, the crowd indulged in a collective “aw.” During a cover of John Mayer’s “Gravity,” friends put their arms around friends, forming swaying chains the length of the stage.

“That was soulful. You could tell there were a lot of emotions,” said attendee Nealie Deol ’24.

“But it was more joyful than sad.”

To end the concert, OGP played the song that started it all, “TJ.” After four years since they first performed the song on that stage, the band’s arrangement was a little tighter, their stage presence a little stronger and their members a little more adult. But some things have not changed.

One of Jones’ falsettos was drowned out by the crowd’s cheers. People danced. The horn section shared a laugh between songs.

For a group whose name has been synonymous with music at Brown, it was a fitting full circle moment. Now, with college mostly in the rearview, Orange Guava Passion will go their separate ways, still looking to squeeze every drop out of what comes next.

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Athletes, coaches, administrators reflect on turbulent two years in Brown Athletics Pandemic, Excellence in Brown Athletics Initiative among sources of controversy, upheaval

BY NICHOLAS MILLER A memorable last couple of years in Brown athletics has seen more than 40 seasons canceled, 11 teams demoted, five reinstated, a pair of lawsuits, one new athletic director and half a baseball team moving to Florida.

Sure, in the fall of 2021, football quarterback E.J. Perry ’21.5 threw for 3,033 yards and soccer striker Brittany Raphino ’23 scored 11 goals, but the most extraordinary statistics — during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Brown University Athletics — came from off the field.

‘In the blink of an eye, it was all stripped away’: COVID sends athletes home The upheaval began at 3 p.m. on March 11, 2020, an hour before Brown was set to host Virginia Tech in women’s lacrosse. The Ivy League presidents issued a statement canceling athletic practices and competitions for the rest of the academic year due to COVID-19. The game went ahead, with Brown upsetting the Hokies 13-11, but Brown wouldn’t compete in another athletic contest for over a year.

The next day, the University announced that all students, including athletes, would be sent

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home. The pandemic had reached campus.

The men’s basketball team had finished its regular season but was expecting to play in a national postseason tournament, according to co-captain David Mitchell ’22. “In the blink of an eye, it was all stripped away,” he said. “We didn’t know when we’d be able to see each other again, when we’d be able to play again.”

Women’s fencing team captain Anna Susini ’22 said that in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown, her sport became the least of her priorities. “I wasn’t thinking of fencing. I was just really in shock that I was going home,” she said. “I remember I got home and just fell into my parents’ arms and cried.”

But what followed the initial shock was the daunting challenge of maintaining a Division I level of training at home, in the middle of the pandemic, without knowing when the next competition would come.

First baseman on the baseball team Ryan Marra ’23 said he lifted weights in his basement and hit in a batting cage at a local field, counteracting the boredom of quarantine. “It was the thing that kept me active,” he said.

Mitchell said he also used a small weight set in his basement and went to a basketball court at a park, but after a few months his “mindset faded and deteriorated.”

“I honestly was saying, ‘What is the point of my training?,’” he said, thinking, “‘I’m not training for anything that’s going to come.’”

Basketball “wasn’t on my mind,” he added, and he began to explore other interests. An English Nonfiction Writing concentrator, Mitchell started keeping a journal and writing opinion pieces on news and sports. This experience inspired him to begin conceptualizing a senior thesis, which he eventually completed this April.

Captain of the gymnastics team Mei Li Costa ’22 said coaches gave the members of her team basic workouts to do, but they were based on fitness, rather than gymnastics. “It was the longest amount of time I’ve taken off gymnastics since I started,” she said, describing the time as a welcome break from intense training.

Sprinter on the men’s track and field team Jack Kelley ’24 was a senior in high school when COVID struck. Members of his team, he recalled, climbed locked fences that surrounded local tracks to try to keep training, and the police often came to kick them out. It “was a very weird thing,” he said. “The sport that’s usually a (source) of joy (was at the time) an illegal activity.”

Above all, he missed the team aspect of the sport. “When that was lost, it really didn’t feel the same at all.”

Commencement

‘It didn’t feel real’: Excellence in Brown Athletics shakes up varsity roster For some athletes, COVID’s upheaval of their sport was trumped by an even greater disruption — the demotion of their team through the Excellence in Brown Athletics Initiative.

On May 28, 2020, Susini had just finished a practice LSAT exam when she received an email telling her to join a Zoom call.

Expecting the Zoom meeting to be brief and straightforward, she hopped on.

It was indeed brief — lasting about 15 minutes — but the content sent a shockwave through the Brown athletic community.

It was on that call that former Athletics Director Jack Hayes announced the demotion of 11 varsity teams — men’s and women’s fencing, men’s and women’s golf, women’s skiing, men’s and women’s squash, women’s equestrian and men’s cross country, track and field — to club status, and the promotion of the club co-ed and women’s sailing teams to the varsity roster as part of a decision dubbed the Excellence in Brown Athletics Initiative.

“I was definitely just in shock,” Susini said. “I remember texting (my co-captain) and asking ‘Did we just get cut?’”

His reply: “Yeah.”

“I was totally wrecked and just laid in bed for several hours,” Susini said.

Kelley didn’t join the Zoom call, but saw that someone texted the news in a group chat with other incoming first-years.

He was in disbelief. “We hadn’t really been a part of this team and it was already over and cut,” he said. “It didn’t feel real.”

Kelley started to contact some of the schools who had recruited him before he committed to Brown and also considered taking a gap year and competing collegiately as an independent.

But with the help of parents and alums, the men’s track, field and cross country teams launched a coordinated and extensive effort to convince the University to reinstate the program.

Just under two weeks after the demotions were announced, President Christina Paxson P’19 informed the track, field and cross country teams that their varsity status would be reinstated, citing the programs’ diversity as an important factor in the reversal.

Other demoted teams were fighting, too.

Alongside a lawsuit from the squash teams alleging breach of contract, a June motion filed against the University argued the administration had violated the terms of a 1998 settlement with Brown that established requirements for female representation in athletics. With the reinstatement of the men’s track, field and cross country teams, the motion alleged, the gender balance among the athletic programs skewed too heavily male.

The lawsuit originally requested that the University completely reinstate the demoted teams, in the interest of restoring gender equity. But in a later settlement, both parties agreed to the sole reinstatement of the women’s fencing and equestrian teams, in exchange for an expiration date set on the consent decree.

Susini described the result of the lawsuit as “bittersweet,” given the fact that her team was reinstated while the men’s fencing team was not.

Kelley found that even after the track team’s reinstatement, some disillusionment with the administration lingered. “It was hard to be as excited

Spring 2022

about Brown athletics as a whole if you’re going to cut the program like that,” he said. “You can’t really undo what that means.”

‘I wish we got a chance to be able to do what we love to do’: Practicing without competition The demoted teams, along with the rest of Brown’s club sports teams, could not officially practice for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year due to COVID-19 restrictions.

But even for the varsity teams, athletic practices were extremely limited.

According to fencing Head Coach Alex Ripa, the women’s fencing team’s practices were reduced to footwork outside on a grass field.

Mitchell said the men’s basketball coaches placed two outdoor hoops on the tennis courts and instructed players to practice shooting there, until the team was able to get back into the gym in February.

And while most conferences allowed for intercollegiate competition, the Ivy League canceled all competitions for all three seasons, though Brown was able to participate in a few events in late spring 2021.

“It was tough watching everyone play, knowing everyone is practicing,” Mitchell said. “It was great to be around the guys (at the outdoor practices), but it was just like, ‘Damn, I wish we got a chance to be able to do what we love to do.’”

After the decision to cancel the spring season was announced, some members of the baseball team left campus and spent the rest of the spring semester training at an elite baseball facility in Florida while taking remote classes. According to Marra, 14 members of the team made the trip.

Some athletes said there were silver linings in their seasons’ cancellations.

“I didn’t feel ready for competition,” Kelley said, adding that the team couldn’t access its track and sometimes had to run in the hallways. “Racing was such a foreign concept at that time.”

And for Susini, who had faced losing her program completely just months earlier, missing a season was comparatively minor. “Getting cut definitely put it into perspective,” she said. “After everything that had happened over the summer, I was like, ‘Brown can’t really do anything else to hurt me at this point.’”

Change in athletics leadership sets new tone Athletic programs received an additional shock in January 2021 when Hayes stepped down. Two months later, the University hired former Brown student-athlete and then-Director of Athletics at Penn M. Grace Calhoun PhD’92 P’26 P’26 as his replacement.

According to Deputy Director of Athletics Colin Sullivan, Calhoun has prioritized the integration of athletics with the broader Brown community, pointing to a greater focus on club sports and recreational activities.

But Ripa said he has also noticed more concrete differences, noting that the administration now responds more quickly and that it has become easier to hold official visits for potential recruits or even take the team out for pizza.

Susini agreed, saying the new athletic administration has been more amenable to the team’s

concerns. “They are definitely making more efforts to include us in the process,” she said.

‘I could see a light at the end of the tunnel’: Competition returns The Ivy League announced just two months after Calhoun’s hiring that fall sports would likely return to regular competition, allowing Brown athletics to end the 18-month gap in its on-field history.

“I was just elated,” Mitchell said of the announcement, adding that it gave him the motivation to get back in shape. “Knowing that I needed to get into that spot really inspired me,” he said. “I could see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Kelley agreed, saying that during the fall 2021 semester, he regained the sense of community within the team that he had missed. “My drive was definitely rejuvenated,” he said.

For many athletes, time away from competition brought a renewed gratitude for their sport when they returned. “We all had a greater appreciation for being able to practice every day, be around each other every day, play every single game, go on the road trips, be in the hotels — all those moments that we had initially (taken) for granted,” Mitchell said.

“I was pretty tired and burnt out by the time our (2020) season got canceled,” Costa said. “So having that break was kind of nice to renew my love of gymnastics.”

Athletes also found other, more personal silver linings in the COVID break. For Costa, for instance, the pause was helpful for her in transitioning out of her sport.

Mitchell, also a senior, said he will take advantage of the extra year of eligibility the NCAA granted to athletes in light of COVID-19. While he can’t continue at Brown due to Ivy League rules, he said he is applying to other graduate schools where he could play on the basketball team while on scholarship.

The break from competition “was deflating, it was disappointing, but at the same time, I was able to grow as a person from this experience. I was able to do certain things that I might not have thought of before,” he said.

Even amid the turmoil her program has faced, Susini said she remains grateful for her experiences within athletics over the last two years.

“The prevailing emotion would be thankfulness,” Susini said. “The people who I’ve met at this institution and the people who I’ve been able to fence with have just been incredible and I know that those are friendships and relationships that I’m going to maintain for years and years to come.”

“That’s what being on a sports team is about,” she added. “I’m really thankful that … not COVID or the cut or anything else really took that away.”

VICTORIA YIN / HERALD

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A different path: U. supports military-affiliated community members on a life of service outside the Van Wickle gates Students, program heads comment on transitions between college, military life

BY LAURA DAVID If you walk around campus on any given Wednesday, you’re sure to spot a member of the University’s ROTC squad clad in army green. Despite being a relatively small population — only about 100 across both the undergraduate and graduate schools — the University’s military-affiliated students comprise one of the most enigmatic groups on campus.

While many students arrive at Brown straight from high school and exit the Van Wickle gates after Commencement to a civilian career, military-affiliated students follow a different path, committing a significant portion of their lives to public service.

Still, the University’s relationship with the military and its military-affiliated community members has been far from linear. At times, it has even been tense and tumultuous. As a result, the experiences of military-affiliated students are often unintelligible to their non-military peers.

An evolving relationship Ties between the institutions have existed since the University’s founding and the Revolutionary War, the Office of Military-Affiliated Students notes on its website. Its ROTC programs, on the other hand, took root in the 1940s and ’50s, but were later subject to intense scrutiny in the late ’60s and early ’70s in the context of backlash against the Vietnam War, the Report of the Committee on the Reserve Officer Training Corps explains.

In 1969, University faculty members voted on a series of resolutions that would remove the status of ROTC as a credit-earning academic department, recommending that it exist as “a special scholarship program sponsored by the Department of Defense,” The Herald previously reported.

Later, in 1972, all ROTC programs were moved off-campus.

But over the last decade, the ROTC and military presence on campus has gained new traction — particularly since the 2011 release of the Committee on the ROTC’s report on reevalu-

24

ating the program’s ban from campus, The Herald previously reported.

“I feel like the dynamic has changed in the last few years,” said Amanda Guerriero ’23, an Army ROTC cadet. “When I joined as a (firstyear), there were just very few of us in the program.

I feel like when you wear the uniform on campus, people definitely look confused. … But in the last few years as the program has grown, the campus awareness is a lot greater and there’s maybe a little less animosity. But there’s definitely still some friction points.”

“My first year, we had about 10 or 11 (Brown) cadets in the program,” said Tyler Jones, a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and the head of the Military Science department at Providence College. “Now, we have 19.” Providence College hosts Rhode Island’s Army ROTC program, accepting cadets from a number of institutions including Brown.

This year’s graduating class will include only one ROTC member — an army cadet that will enter active duty post-graduation — but next year’s class will include four Army ROTC cadets alone, Jones added.

Military connections on campus While Jones has only directed the Providence College ROTC for three years, he noted that during his tenure he has seen relations between the University and the program improve.

The University “has been consistently supportive,” said Jones. “That consistent support has allowed us to grow.”

Jones added that, in particular, the program has found an ally in the Office of Military-Affiliated Students, which aims to support both ROTC cadets and any University community members that have military connections.

“The Office of Military-Affiliated Students aims to support the military-affiliated community in many different ways, but often it’s being an advocate for this population on campus,” wrote

Mac Manning, the OMAS program director, in an email to The Herald. “This can include connecting said students to the various resources that Brown has to offer, speaking to prospective students, offering specific programming aimed to improve the overall experience here at Brown and working with different offices such as admissions, Financial Aid and the registrar.”

The community, Manning explained, doesn’t only include students enrolled in various ROTC programs but also student veterans, who can apply to the University via a specific veteran application. Currently, there are about 30 undergraduate veterans, but, including graduate students and dependents, the number exceeds 100, he added.

“OMAS students, particularly veterans, have unique personal experiences that they bring to the table. It’s important to understand that there are many different reasons why someone may join the military,” Manning said. “It’s also important to note that all military experiences are equal. …

As a result, OMAS students offer rich and diverse experiences to the Brown community.”

The transition from service to academia and, conversely, out of academia into a life of service, is distinct from the typical pathway from college campuses to civilian life.

“What you see (at Brown) is a lot of students coming straight out of high school, usually elite high schools,” said Nikhel Sylvain ’22.5. Before enrolling at the University, Sylvain served for six years in the Air Force Reserve with three years of active duty. During that time, he also enrolled in community college. A year and a half ago, he applied to Brown as a traditional transfer student.

“Having a six-year gap, that was pretty difficult,” he said. “I remember my first semester, I felt like I had to work five times as hard as everyone else to obtain the same kind of grades.”

Being a military-affiliated student on campus can, indeed, add its own unique challenges to an already-daunting college experience.

“There’s definitely a lot of fun times (in ROTC) — and the camaraderie just makes

Commencement

SARA RUNKEL / HERALD

everything a lot more fun — but also as a female, it is a little challenging to find your place,” Guerriero said. “In freshman year, I struggled with … how to fit in in an (ROTC) class that was almost all men and to feel like you’re equally valued as your peers.”

As their time in the program went on, though, Guerrerio noted that they were able to find their stride.

Sylvain, too, explained that his background as both a veteran and middle-class student changed the way he viewed and interacted with the general “Brown bubble.”

“Coming to Brown, I saw different opportunities exist,” he continued. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, 10 years after Brown, the average salary is $120,000. That’s so incredible!’ And then sitting at a table full of traditional Brown students, they looked to me and said, ‘I hope I’m making $120,000 in my first year.’ I was really confused.”

And, despite the various supports available on campus, Sylvain still feels there is work to be done in terms of better incorporating military-affiliated students into the broader University culture such as bridging gaps between transfers, RUE students, Veteran Scholars, and traditional undergraduates.

Preparing for service When students enter the Army ROTC program, they spend their two years as underclassmen taking a series of foundational military science courses and engaging in mission simulation exercises that inform the work they do over the course of their training, Jones explained. By their junior year, cadets are finally given more significant leadership roles and begin preparations for moving out of the college environment and into a world of duty.

“It’s melded pretty well with my college experience in general,” Guerriero said. “A lot of the best friends I have are from the ROTC program at Brown.”

In the summer between junior and senior year, cadets travel to Fort Knox to be assessed against other students from programs across the country. “The junior year is kind of the culminat-

Spring 2022

ing experience of being a cadet,” he added. Finally, cadets return in senior year to run the Army ROTC program. It is also in this final year that the transition from college to service truly begins.

“It’s a very deliberate process,” Jones explained. “It starts with getting their branch, which they get in December of their senior year.” Cadets are able to rank their preferences for which of the 17 branches of the army they would like to enter post-graduation and are matched based on both the spots available for new recruits and their evaluations at camp in Fort Knox and in their program in general, he continued.

“Once they have their branch assignment, then their first assignment in the army will essentially be basic training for that branch,” Jones said.

“So, say an officer has matched into the armor branch, they’re going to learn how to function as a tank commander (and) lead tanks in battle. So they would go to Fort Benning, Georgia, where they learn (those skills).”

While many ROTC members aspire to become full-time members of a branch after graduation, options other than active duty are open to students as well. “There are, in any given year, about 5500 Army ROTC cadets across the country and usually only around 3000 that get to go into active duty,” Jones said. “If a cadet wants to be in the reserves or the National Guard, they can choose (that).”

Beyond the Van Wickle Gates While ROTC doesn’t train its students for specific duty tasks, it does instill in them a broad knowledge base with an emphasis on leadership, which its program heads believe will allow graduates to be successful in any military role and, more generally, in life, Jones said.

“My plan right now is to commission as an active duty officer,” Guerrerio said. “I have a fouryear service commitment, and I’m thinking a lot about my top branch choices right now. … But after that, I think it just depends on my experience and if I feel like it’s a good place for me to be.”

No matter what she chooses to do once

her service commitment is complete, Guerrerio feels that the leadership training she received in ROTC would prove useful for the rest of her life.

“I’m not a natural outspoken, take-charge kind of person. But definitely I feel like, with my training the last few years, whenever I’m in a position where I need to take a leadership role, I’m so much more comfortable and confident than I would have been as a (first-year),” she continued.

Nonetheless, transitioning from the college campus bubble to military life can be daunting.

“If you choose active duty, you enter the army feeling like you know nothing, but you have all these people around you that have been around doing this for a very long time, but you’re in charge,” Jones said. “It’s humbling and it’s stressful in its own way. … I don’t know that this happens in the civilian world quite the same way. You don’t enter an organization in the civilian world and then be made the boss of people that have been around for 20 years.”

Regardless of the challenges, members of ROTC and OMAS expressed their belief that connections with the military often yield new and valuable lenses through which to view the world — both at and after Brown.

“Coming to Brown with the little bit of life experience that the military allowed me was really interesting,” Sylvain said. “Sitting in (international relations) classes … I think it’s pretty eye-opening to have kind of lived the textbooks to some extent.”

While Sylvain plans to work in finance after leaving the University, he still feels his military experience will color the trajectory of his career in one way or another.

“Serving in the nation’s army or in the military in general, it provides you with a different lens of how to assess and how to solve problems,” Jones said. “I do think that service in the military is about leadership, and that leadership is directly relevant to any given job or profession after service. … Understanding people, relating to people, being able to lead and bring people together as a team, getting them to achieve a common goal — it’s all of those things.”

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Communicating the messages of COVID-19 Q&A with EVP for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ‘91 MA’06

BY ANNA KIM & HALEY SANDLOW Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as public health guidelines and University policies have shifted in response to the spread of an ever-changing virus, Brown community members have turned to University-wide communications as a critical resource. News traveled as students opened their inboxes to unexpected changes, ranging from the abrupt end to in-person classes in spring 2020 to the lifting of masking and testing requirements this semester. At other times, information has been anticipated, as with weekly campus safety updates. One of the central figures involved in these communications has been Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ’91 MA’06. Carey has worked at Brown since the 1990s, assuming roles such as co-chair of the Land Acknowledgement Working Group and overseeing Brown’s development plans. The Herald spoke with Carey about his role during the pandemic as an administrator with a hand in related communications.

faculty and others who had colleagues, particularly in Italy, as we were spending a lot of time focused on students studying abroad and whether programs would be shutting down and whether they should be called back, and communications about changing protocols for events. Then within a week or week and a half, we were shutting down.

Haley Sandlow: How did your responsibilities change with the pandemic?

Sandlow: Have you led the communications, or have you worked with other members of the community and administration in those days?

Russell Carey: Over the course of the spring semester, from February 2020 up until early March, it was increasing in intensity. To back up a little bit, in the year 2010 or so, we had had prior experience with a flu called H1N1 that was not nearly as serious in terms of worldwide impact. … Having had the experience, in the beginning, I and others felt like it was somewhat similar to that.

So in February, every week, it felt like it was getting more impactful, and then when things started to shut down, it was certainly getting people’s attention. If you went back and looked at when the communications started, we did some communications early on, but they were pretty modest and the Core Crisis Team was managing it effectively.

But by early March, things started to change really dramatically. Particularly, we were hearing from

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Then it started to be more … of a regular structure and maybe more project-based. For example, I was a member of the President’s Task Force to focus on planning for (fall 2020). When we had emptied out almost all the residence halls, we provided housing for … first responders — people working in hospitals, medicine and other emergencies — so that these folks who were needed could keep doing their jobs but didn’t have to go home. And then I’d say the major thing that I took on with others was I led the process to implement (COVID-19 testing).

Carey: Everything was a very broad-based team effort. It’s probably not always readily apparent how many people are doing a lot of different things all the time — … Health Services, … (Emergency Medical Services) and medical staff. But that basically carries across every department at Brown, right? Some of the ones that are more obvious are Health Services or Dining or Residential Life, but there’s a whole team of people that became very adept at procuring masks and tests and the logistics behind the testing process and the space and facilities and ventilation. …

To touch briefly on information technology — the support of both the initial crash, -shift, transition to Zoom, helping faculty do hybrid or fully online … there was a tremendous amount of help from

behind the scenes to make that happen. …

But there’s a lot of people who are involved in shaping and reviewing communications. It varies based on how momentous the communications are.

The campus safety updates are pretty straightforward, but certainly about a year ago, when we were first announcing that vaccinations would be required, that was a different type of communication. So, I might have initially drafted it, but lots of people would be involved in reviewing it.

Anna Kim: So administratively, what does the communication process look like from the decision-making to sending out the email? Who ultimately has the eyes on all the emails that were sent out to the Brown community?

Carey: So probably the key department is the Office of University Communications, so Brian Clark ... and our Senior Vice President (for Communications Cass Cliatt), who certainly oversee communications generally. The communications around COVID are so widespread, and it’s changed over time. I think in the early part of the pandemic, but maybe even up until sort of the middle of this semester, … lots of people (were) involved. … Now, that can vary to a certain extent, particularly these campus safety updates… For the most part, that’s me and Brian doing those emails, (but) oftentimes I’ll be … asking other people like (Vice President for Campus Life) Eric Estes, or (Associate Vice President for Campus Life and Executive Director of Health and Wellness) Vanessa Britto, or just different colleagues, to look at that (communication) in terms of the tone and the content and the messaging.

And so, the short answer is, although there is a process, it can vary a little bit depending on how routine or not routine that messaging is. But, just to give maybe a more direct example, … (for) the communications around the vaccination require-

Commencement

ment, most likely I did a first draft, then Cass cast would then review and then a lot of people from Campus Life, Health Services, General Counsel, Provost or President, probably other executives, Human Resources — a lot of eyes would see (it), especially something that’s making a major policy.

Sandlow: There has been this extensive communication throughout the pandemic — urgent announcements, changes in protocols, controversial subjects, such as vaccination requirements. As one of the central figures in this communication, how have you felt about being in this role, especially knowing that the news you’re sending may not necessarily be what everyone wants to hear or bring about frustration?

Carey: I’m very sensitive to that. I think it may not always seem that way to everybody, but I think we … have tried to temper health and safety with the mission of the University, and obviously we have an academic vision, but there’s a lot more to it than academics. It was really discouraging to have to disrupt this semester, like you experienced, so making a return to a residential academic experience was a high priority from very early on. At the same time, balancing and prioritizing health and safety had to be a very high priority as well. … For the most part, my experience has been that people and students in particular have been very receptive and very serious about both their own health and safety and that of others. Students in particular, especially before vaccination, at least every impression I had, (were) extraordinarily conscious of the health and safety of dining workers and custodial workers and other people who they were interacting with day to day. And so every now and then, there’s someone who sends an email that’s critical, but that’s not been the dominant theme at all.

I certainly haven’t felt too concerned about how people react to things because I think we have a lot of experience with people that I would describe as reacting well. … We had to say that everything had to go virtual at the beginning of (the fall 2021 se-

mester) because we were seeing an uptick in cases.

So we went to grab-and-go dining, and there were some other restrictions associated with that, and it got interpreted as “all student activities had to be virtual.” I think, very understandably, to students, it felt like, “We just got here, we did everything you asked us to do, and we’re going online again.” So we sent out communication the next day clarifying what we meant. So, it’s probably a good example of how complicated this can be because there’s just so many different things that happen on campus, and you want to have policies and protocols and processes that are clear and consistent and easy to follow, especially for public health.

We also got some feedback from faculty earlier this semester because we’ve been able to do a report on the number of employees who are on COVID-19-related leave, but it doesn’t really capture people whose schedules are disrupted. This was especially true in January and February for people with elementary- and high-school-aged children, where school schedules are changing every day. …

So there’s now language in that weekly communication that gives that broader context.

Kim: Out of all the announcements, what do you think was the most challenging announcement to communicate and why?

Carey: I do think it was the switch to antigen testing because we did get a fair amount of concern about that. I don’t want to underestimate or minimize that, as making any change as Omicron in the country was peaking felt risky to a lot of people. …

We had seen how PCR testing had been happening, particularly at Cornell right before the winter break, where positive test results just skyrocketed.

I think we felt it was capturing more than was necessary, particularly the PCR tests that could pick up remnants of virus from up to the last three months. … We get illness at the beginning of every semester anyways, and that had certainly been aggravated during COVID. … I think that shift (to antigen testing) was the right decision to make and

worked out well for the campus.

It was not easy to get the tests. We were trying to get tests at the same time as a lot of colleges and universities, … but (so were) the federal government, the state government, too. … We made that shift right away before classes started, … so we were a little bit on the edge of whether we would have enough tests. And then a few weeks later, we have plenty of tests. So it was really about the opening of the semester that we’re really concerned about.

Kim: What lessons have you learned throughout this process?

Carey: Hopefully patience. Actually maybe two things. I think one is that it’s really been a lesson in uncertainty, particularly with regard to understanding the virus, how it’s transmitted and what its impact can be on different people with different risk profiles. Probably a lesser example of that is … as we were shutting down, one case, it was so paralyzing. Now, we’re having hundreds of cases right now, and it’s concerning, and I think every one of those people is a priority, but it’s not shutting us down — both on campus and in society.

The vaccines are obviously a huge part of that. But it’s also, I think, the sort of ebbs and flows of both awareness and understanding and then how things keep shifting.

I think another theme is just the willingness of people to come together and support each other.

The students have been a huge part of that and the student culture around it has been reassuring. I mean, I would have thought that going in, but it’s nice to have it confirmed and sustained — and, as I said earlier, particularly the respect from students of more vulnerable members of the community, people who had to work in person or in communities that have been more adversely affected by the impact than others, and then the willingness of those individuals to continue to support students.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TRACY PAN / HERALD

Spring 2022

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From pandemic virality to building a brand: Seniors ride the next wave of social media Kaiti Yoo ’22, Ben Michals ’22 talk candidly on building a career on social media, next projects, future of industry

BY CLAIRE LIU During an afternoon in the Blue Room, Kaiti Yoo ’22 — current senior, former Herald senior staff writer and, since last month, YouTuber with over 500,000 subscribers — chatted about flying out to Coachella this year for her first brand-sponsored trip and chance to meet other content creators. Opportunities like these have been in the works, but surpassing the 500,000 subscriber milestone has given her the space to pursue bigger ideas and projects, Yoo said.

Yoo will be graduating this spring with a double concentration in Economics and Modern Culture and Media. Since starting her channel in 2020 during lockdown, she has devoted most of her time to a fast-growing platform on YouTube and Instagram, where she produces fashion and lifestyle content.

The pipeline from bored college student to viral internet figure to full-time creator, while possible before, was accelerated to unprecedented levels during the pandemic, Yoo said. At Coachella, Yoo said she was the youngest creator in terms of time since starting her channel, and she doesn’t shy away from describing the “nervous wreck” she was leading up to the event.

Yoo’s honesty and advice on topics like imposter syndrome, perfectionism — “done is better than perfect sometimes” is her motto — and the benefits of therapy arise naturally when speaking to her. As part of how she expresses herself off and on camera, Yoo has said in a video that she has drawn on the strengths of her personality and editing style in building her personal platform.

Two experiences at Brown were influential in her journey as a creator — taking VISA 0120: “Foundation Media,” which helped “light a fire” in her to work with editing software, and receiving encouragement from Executive Director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship

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Danny Warshay ’87 in his course ENGN 1010: “The Entrepreneurial Process” to pursue content creation full time.

Being a content creator is similar to an

“I’m not sure if fashion is the end-all, be-all calling for me … but I do feel like the dots are all being connected.” entrepreneur in that, for both, you “go out there and risk falling on your face every week by pitching this new product to people,” Yoo said on uploading videos weekly. A common pitfall in entrepreneurship is “creating a product that solves nobody’s needs,” she added. With social media platforms, she has found a uniquely “intimate” space to hear direct feedback from her audience about the problems they are going through.

These interactions can be impactful for both the fan and the creator during difficult times. Reflecting on what helps her continue making videos in the face of burnout, Yoo said she particularly remembers an anonymous comment she received on Discord that said her uploading a video that day made them decide not to take their life.

Yoo feels she now has enough security to

pursue a career as a content creator after graduation and has recently hired a team to support her as she prepares to move to New York.

“I’m not sure if fashion is the end-all, beall calling for me, … but I do feel like the dots

“Fame is fleeting, and I don’t want to live off that for the rest of my life. I’m going to New York City because it’s … an overflowing amalgamation of every industry, and I really want to go there to find out what I don’t know.” are all being connected,” she said. Yoo hinted at upcoming design collaborations with brands and hopes in the long term to help address the need for clothing textiles that do not pose health concerns like the allergies and skin issues she personally has faced.

“Fame is fleeting, and I don’t want to live

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off that for the rest of my life,” Yoo said.

“I’m going to New York City because it’s … an overflowing amalgamation of every industry, and I really want to go there to find out what I don’t know.”

Though Ben Michals ’22 found his start in content creation on TikTok during the pandemic, in many ways his journey shares common threads with Yoo’s.

A fan of the relatable jingle-style comedy skits of Bill Wurtz and Bo Burnham, Michals, a longtime musician, spent a few months sharing music on TikTok before gaining traction when he started using the jingle-style format in his TikToks. Over the past two years, he has amassed over 140,000 followers and released two singles.

Michals said that seeing rapid growth and having the support of a fanbase even before officially releasing music is a phenomenon made possible by the new era of short-form content.

Michals is grateful that his jingles have resonated with such a large audience and helped make him and others feel less alone during the pandemic. But he noted a “side of being a creator that’s not talked a lot about — the unpredictability of all of it.” On TikTok, where the algorithm plays a large role in determining the views a video receives regardless of the effort put in, Michals opened up that “it’s been a journey for me personally of separating myself from my content in terms of validation.”

An important realization for him was that

“I strongly believe there is a lot of creativity out there that doesn’t ever see the light of day because of (the creator’s) background, where they came from.” how a video performs numbers-wise “is not the true determinant of the value of that content.”

He has taken a step back from short-form content over the past few months to reflect on his larger goals with music and to work on his biggest project yet — a full-length album, which he hopes to release later this year.

With a sound he describes as “lying somewhere in between Rex Orange County, Finneas and Jon Bellion,” the album is part of Michals’s

Spring 2022

thesis for his Music concentration, which he studied alongside Computer Science. Produced under the guidance of Professor of Music Todd

“Short-form content is step one of unlocking the total creative potential that our society has to offer.”

Winkler and Lecturer and Technical Director James Moses MA’18, the album revolves around the theme “What’s the right path for me?”

— a question Michals has come across frequently as a college student at Brown, observing other students following “cookie-cutter careers.”

The search for the answer to this question does not end with college and is a process Michals is living through as he plans on exploring other careers while continuing work on music projects and content creation in New York after graduating. Part of the message from the album is “understanding and

appreciating that you don’t have to have it all figured out,” he said.

Having gained experience through business courses at Brown and through internships, Michals has been deeply interested and involved in the business side of media, including negotiating his first deal with a record label on his first single “The Internet Song.”

He has also been part of an early creator program to support the launch of Instagram Reels, the platform’s version of short-form content, provide feedback to the product team and develop promotional content using Reels. Now, Michals has plans to work within the NFT space for music in his desire to “be part of an even greater democratization of who can enter the music industry and how they can finance that.”

In the era of TikTok, music and video production and distribution have never been more accessible and have helped “democratize content and media,” which Michals called “a really beautiful thing for the industry.” More artists are trying to stay independent and maintain more ownership of their music and, by building an audience on their own on TikTok, they “don’t necessarily need a label,” he said.

“I strongly believe there is a lot of creativity out there that doesn’t ever see the light of day because of (the creator’s) background, where they came from,” he said. “Short-form content is step one of unlocking the total creative potential that our society has to offer.”

Yoo agreed that new technologies will help enable the future of media, which she predicts will “go into immersive storytelling more and more.” The battle of our times is “spiritual and emotional, and, in order to make people feel like they’re in a community, … I think we’re going to continue turning more and more toward media (beyond three dimensions) to connect with each other,” Yoo said.

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From Bears young and old: Brown freshmen and seniors reflect on campus culture

Students discuss changing traditions, social life, the pandemic’s impact

BY KATY PICKENS For students that have been on Brown’s campus in the last four years, there have been two definitive eras: before the pandemic hit, and after.

To understand the impact of the pandemic on student culture and the on-campus experience, The Herald spoke to three senior students and three first-years about their time at Brown, the pandemic and student traditions.

Both seniors and freshmen agreed that Brown carries a warm culture among the student body, but because of the pandemic, first-years and seniors participated in this culture in different ways. Some seniors discussed their worries about traditions, from the Naked Donut Run to specific club customs, fading.

But, reflecting on their time at Brown and looking forward, both remained optimistic.

Brown’s campus culture Seniors and first-years alike characterized the student culture at Brown as individualistic, welcoming and kind. Despite the disruption of the pandemic, the school’s social values have maintained.

“In an overall sense, I think that its culture is really positive,” said Zoe Zimmermann ’22.5. “I think we really have a reputation of being the happiest Ivy and live up to that, which is really great.”

Lucas Kuan ’22 agreed that the University’s culture is generally welcoming. “I would say socially, it’s very friendly, but pretty laid-back.”

“Everyone’s really open-minded and really flexible and willing to try new things,” said Annie Huang ’22. “With the open curriculum … my friends and my classmates all seem to always be exploring something outside of their concentration or interest. And I think this carries through within my social life.”

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First-years noticed a similar openness and acceptance in Brown’s student culture.

“Socially, it’s … independent individuals,” said Hannah Landau ’25. “The student body is friendly, and I think academically it’s kind of the same.”

She noted that Brown students tend to approach problems with humor and levity, saying students tend to be “silly and goofy. Like, scientifically, they’re just more silly and goofy.”

“From the social side, Brown’s been very inclusive,” said Dhruv Anand ’25.

Though first-years and seniors agreed on Brown’s laid-back and open culture, they differed when it came to meeting new people. First-years mentioned a certain ease of meeting new people, while seniors reflected on how the pandemic made those meetings more rare.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for meeting people with different grades and meeting people based on your interests,” said Hayden Deffarges ’25. “And I’ve never felt too hemmed in by any particular social group or activity.”

“I think there’s always avenues for meeting new people, like at any point in the semester at any time,” they added.

For seniors, expanding their social circles was extremely challenging during the pandemic. “The biggest thing (was) not meeting as many people,” Kuan said.

Huang agreed that meeting other students during the pandemic was exceptionally difficult.

“That’s something that sometimes I feel sad about for (my) entire junior year,” she said. “I definitely tried to make that up this year as a senior.”

Kuan noticed that friend groups and social circles remained pretty static, and that this carried through into academic relationships as well.

“Not being able to go to class in person, not

being able to drop by office hours as naturally as you would have before the pandemic, you don’t really get the same exposure to some of the professors and some of the faculty as you might in other years,” Kuan said.

Zimmermann said that isolation due to COVID created “a chasm between upperclassmen and underclassmen.”

Continuity and knowledge within clubs and specific extracurriculars also suffered during the pandemic.

“I’m a little bit worried for when the current seniors leave, because we’re the only ones with a good memory of pre-pandemic stuff,” Zimmerman said. “A lot of things have been lost in the pandemic.”

In the tap-dancing club What’s On Tap?, for instance, Zimmermann mentioned a dance that was traditionally practiced every year. But due to the pandemic, a number of members either had no experience with the dance or had forgotten and had to relearn it from scratch.

But since the pandemic, there has been a new appreciation for in-person activities and an increase in people branching out, Huang noted. “People are really putting themselves out there,” she said. “I’ve encouraged my friends to try new things, and I’ve done that myself.”

Brown traditions: The Louis Challenge, Naked Donut Run and more Zimmermann noted that while there may be excitement about University traditions, it seems they have faded. “Especially since the pandemic, I feel like this thing has kind of gone off the rails. It’s not as vibrant as I think it was.”

Zimmermann has both witnessed and run in

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DANA RICHIE / HERALD

the Naked Donut Run. That tradition “is definitely one that I think changed after the pandemic,” she said, explaining that some underclassmen didn’t know about the tradition until they saw it for themselves. “People didn’t realize it was happening … there were a lot of scared people in the Rock.”

During his time at Brown, Kuan said he had done the Louis Challenge, an informal tradition where students pull an all-nighter and eat at Louis Family Restaurant when it opens — while Louis opened at 5 a.m. before the pandemic, contenders now have to stay up an extra hour since the restaurant delayed its opening time to 6 a.m. Kuan had also completed the Ratty Challenge, which entails staying at the dining hall from breakfast to dinner.

First-years have not participated in many University traditions. Deffarges explained that beyond seeing a few friends run in the NDR, they haven’t engaged with many other specific challenges or traditions.

Anand participated in the Primal Scream, but missed the NDR. “I haven’t experienced a ton of traditions at Brown so far,” he said.

Zimmermann explained that she had originally called it New Dorm, but was excited about the new moniker. When she was a sophomore in 2019, she and her friends had tried to rename the dormitory as well. We “hated the name New Dorm. We thought that was a stupid name,” she said. Their alternative was “Vart,” but it didn’t catch on.

Among first-years, some don’t call the dorm anything at all. Landau said she only knew the dorm as “the place where they had Rocky Horror auditions.”

“We usually call it Greg,” Deffarges said.

“For a while as a joke, we were calling it Varty-G. I would say we never call it New Dorm.”

Anand said that he had “mixed responses” to the Greg versus New Dorm debate. He had been introduced to the dorm by upperclassmen who called it New Dorm. “But then I heard about the whole debate,” he said.

“It’s something kind of like a clout thing,” Anand added. “If you call it New Dorm, you’re cool. Because you’re just older, right?”

Is it Greg or New Dorm?

Looking back and looking ahead

One of the most telling indicators of a cultural shift occurring between class years due to the pandemic has been the colloquial debate over what the Vartan Gregorian Quadrangle is called.

Since its construction, students had called the dormitory New Dorm — but this changed when the class of 2024 was isolated from other class years due to the pandemic. A new nickname took hold: Greg.

When asked, Huang and Kuan were firm.

“It’s New Dorm,” they both said.

Seniors and first-years alike agreed that college has been a time for growth and personal change.

“I hope that I don’t ever get too settled,” Deffarges said about their hopes for their next three years at Brown. “I hope I’m always doing new things and meeting new people. I think the magic of a place like Brown is looking to connect all the time.”

Landau said that while college is difficult in many ways, she looks forward to continuing to grow. “I wouldn’t say it’s completely the most fun,

Spring 2022

but I think it’s very forgiving,” she said about her first year so far.

“I hope to change in a way that I can’t anticipate,” she added. “As long as I like it, I feel like that’s how I will keep together under stress and pay attention to where I am.”

“It’s had its ups and downs, as life tends to have,” Anand said. “But overall, I think college has been a good thing for me. I really love the independence that I have.”

The seniors, now at the end of their college experience, expressed gratitude for their time at Brown despite the pandemic and other disruptions.

“I had the best time in college,” Zimmermann said. “A big reason why I took a gap semester over the pandemic is because I wanted to make the most of it. I still have another semester left to do that.”

“I’m definitely thankful,” Kuan said. “Despite the circumstances, I found a really good group of people freshman year and sophomore year, and we’ve hung out since.”

Huang said that despite the difficulties she faced in her time at Brown, it’s all been worth it.

“I’ve definitely grown in many ways, since I came to Brown as a freshman,” she said. “It definitely hasn’t really been easy.”

“But generally, I’m really thankful for the experiences and people I’ve met in four years at Brown.”

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At Brown, their tech startups took root: Seniors reflect on innovation in and beyond college

BY CLAIRE LIU For some seniors at Brown, entrepreneurship is less a foreign concept that brings to mind a Silicon Valley pipe dream, but rather a core part of their college experience and identity. With an ambition to use technology in innovative ways to address the pressing issues society faces, the co-founders of two tech startups spoke with The Herald on their approach to growing a venture out of college, innovating and paving their own paths forward.

Evan Jackson ’21.5 and Alexander Rothberg ’22 founded Intus Care along with Robbie Felton ’21.5 in late 2019 to use patient data to optimize long-term care by health care providers. They recently celebrated raising an additional $3.1 million in seed funding last month to grow the health care analytics platform, with their funding now totaling $5.4 million.

“We’ve gotten a really great reaction (to the latest funding), especially from the Brown community,” Jackson said. “That’s something we’ve seen throughout the time that we started this.”

Jackson and Felton started developing the venture in their first year at Brown. By a stroke of luck, the two met current Chief Technology Officer Rothberg in ENGN 1931T: “Entrepreneurship Practicum: Starting, Running and Scaling Ventures,” when he surprised them as another student who wanted to “build a software analytics platform for geriatric care organizations,” Jackson recalled.

The team secured their first funding from winning the Brown Venture Prize in 2020, and each founder has taken time off from college to work full time in elderly care organizations, alongside the people that their solution serves, while building the platform, Jackson said.

This focus on serving others informs their decisions as they look to expand their team and reach their long-term goal of serving all Medicare/Medicaid-eligible patients in the country.

Around 20 health care organizations across seven states now use the Intus Care platform, according to the co-founders. This mindset applies to the technical design of their product as well: “If you design with empathy, you’re not thinking, ‘What do I need for myself as a 20-something-year-old tech-enabled person to use this product?’ It’s ‘What do our users need?’” Rothberg said.

Working within the overlooked space of long-term care constantly requires innovative thinking and technological design, the co-founders said. For care coordinators in traditional

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Co-founders of Intus Care, MediCircle ventures spearhead solutions in health care

health care to change their mentality of patient care to one that incorporates data analytics is “a cultural shift,” Rothberg said. To address this, the team has been working to make Intus Care’s technology as accessible and actionable as possible for everyday use. They plan to roll out a new “Actions and Insights” feature in the coming months that will automatically note on the back end when new information on a patient arises from their health data and produce an easy-to-read alert for the provider with recommended actions.

The team is currently working out of Providence to grow the venture and will continue full-time after Rothberg graduates this spring. In retrospect, “it looks like you can draw a straight

“Business models, innovation and technology are becoming intelligent enough that they can provide value to people and derive their revenue from other sources.” line, but it was definitely very (much) one decision at a time,” Rothberg said, “and that doesn’t mean you’re undercommitting to your venture.”

Jackson agreed, noting that “as you continue to hit milestones, … you really start to eliminate some of those ‘what if ’ questions and start to see where you can take this company.”

Jack Schaeffer ’22 and Eliza Sternlicht ’22, co-founders of MediCircle, met during first-year orientation and connected over a common desire to address inequities. After working together on Bear Dens, a platform to make college housing options easier to navigate, Sternlicht, an aspiring doctor at the time, conducted a survey on anesthesiologists and found that over half of respondents said that their waste management practices needed to be updated.

After four weeks spent visiting every nursing home in Rhode Island within driving distance,

the two realized there was a need for a solution that could provide cancer patients who cannot afford prescriptions with unfinished chemotherapy prescriptions that are typically thrown out.

MediCircle, which won the Brown Venture Prize in 2021, uses advanced software to track donations in this redistribution process. The venture’s technology takes advantage of the pharmaceutical industry’s recent move to mandate serialized barcodes on medication to prevent the circulation of counterfeit drugs, Sternlicht said.

Information pulled from the barcodes adds to a comprehensive profile of each donated medication and can then be recertified, she said.

Existing medication distributors have built models that work well with a particular state’s legislation, but MediCircle’s innovative model can be replicated across the country, Schaeffer said.

After the venture was featured in the Boston Globe, the co-founders fondly recalled receiving a huge wave of support from the oncology community, with around $60,000 worth of unused medication arriving on the doorstep of Schaeffer’s childhood home, listed as the company address at the time. The team now has a waitlist of several thousand people, raised $1.2 million in a pre-seed round of funding and plans to launch soon.

Sternlicht used to think there was a “onetrack path” to help patients: by pursuing medicine.

But by working to grow MediCircle, she feels she can fulfill the same life goal in a new way.

These budding entrepreneurs join a wave of technological innovation that is yet to be defined, but they offer some visions of what the future could look like. Schaeffer and Sternlicht noted a move in tech toward social good as the measure of success. Companies are “becoming very adept to the fact that (their) value proposition and helping people are really the same work,” Schaeffer said.

“Business models, innovation and technology are becoming intelligent enough that they can provide value to people and derive their revenue from other sources.”

The increase in “diversity in experience and thought” in the startup space as a whole will definitely lead to a more diverse set of tech product offerings, Jackson said.

The emergence of alternative forms of financing, such as crowdsourced investing, will also contribute to a diversity in the types of problems that are invested in, Rothberg added.

“I’m really excited to see the next things that will be brought to life,” Jackson said.

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Mary & Jerome Vascellaro ’74, P’07 and Matt Vascellaro ’07 Welcome all Brown University Alumni, Alumnae, Students, Parents, Faculty, Staff and Friends to a Reception on Martha’s Vineyard with Brown University President Christina H. Paxson Wednesday, August 10, 2022 5:30 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. For more information, please contact Special_Events@brown.edu or 401.863.6010

Congratulations to our graduating Class of 2022 fellows!

Kaitlan Bui

Yara Doumani

Jane Freiman

Connor Jenkins

English, East Asian Studies

History, Environmental Studies

American Studies, Comparative Literature

History, Africana Studies

humanities.brown.edu

Diego Rodriguez Langevin Neuroscience, Computer Science, Philosophical Inquiry Through Creative Forms

Often when you think of venture capital investing, you think of endowments and pension funds investing in hard-to-access opportunities. Alumni

A unique opportunity to invest alongside your classmates.

Ventures is disrupting the venture capital industry by offering a path for accredited investors to own an actively managed, diversified venture portfolio that invests alongside well-known VC firms. This asset class has outperformed the S&P over many periods.1 With Waterman Ventures, the idea is simple—by investing together with other Brown University alumni, we all can do better.

Waterman Ventures is the Alumni Ventures VC fund for Brown University alumni and friends of the community.

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Join Us This Weekend Saturday 5/28, Brown Faculty Club, 5PM Congratulations to the Class of ‘22 on the first of many big successes in your professional life. Join us for a celebratory event to meet and mingle with our fund team, founders, and fellow investors.

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Scan to Learn More

Cambridge Associates, Venture Capital Benchmarks, March 31, 2019.

Important Disclosure: The Manager of Waterman Ventures is Alumni Ventures Group, LLC (AV), a venture capital firm. AV and the fund are not sponsored by, affiliated with, or otherwise endorsed by the Brown University. AV’s funds are very long-term investmens that involve substantial risk of loss, including loss of all capital invested. For informational purposes only; offers of securities are made only to accredited investors pursuant to a fund’s offering documents, which describe the risks, fees and other information that should be considered before investing. Examples of prior portfolio company investments are provided for illustrative purposes only; there is no guarantee that the fund will invest in or achieve the same exposure to, or quality of, companies held by any existing fund. The lead venture capital firms listed are provided for illustrative purposes only; there is no guarantee that any fund will invest alongside of any other venture capital firm.

Contact Investor Relations at Investor.Relations@Waterman-Ventures.com for additional information. *For illustration purposes only. These deals are not intended to suggest any level of investment returns; not necessarily indicative of deals invested by any one fund or investor. Many returns in investments result in the loss of capital invested. These deals are not available to future fund investors except potentially in certain follow-on investment options. AV offers smart, simple venture investing to accredited investors. Specifically, AV provides a path for individuals to own an actively managed diversified venture portfolio with a single investment co-investing alongside experienced VC firms. Traditionally, with limited investment capital and contacts, individual investors have had limited access to desirable deals alongside experienced VC firms, and even if they could access one or more such deals, it would take an inordinate amount of time, money and negotiation to build a diversified portfolio. With AV Funds, investors can choose from a number of funds to make a single investment to gain exposure to a diversified portfolio of investments selected by an experienced manager. AV Funds’ simple fee mechanism permits investors to avoid constant capital calls throughout the life of the fund as found in other private investment vehicles. All private placements of securities and other broker dealer activities are currently offered through a partnership with Independent Brokerage Solutions LLC MEMBER: FINRA / SIPC (“IndieBrokers”), which is located at 485 Madison Avenue 15th Floor New York, NY 10022. (212) 751-4424. AV and its affiliates are independent and unaffiliated with IndieBrokers. Any securities transactions or related activities offered by AV associated persons are conducted in their capacities as registered representatives of IndieBrokers. To check the background of IndieBrokers and its representatives, visit FINRA’s BrokerCheck (https://brokercheck.finra.org) where you can also find our Form CRS (https://files.brokercheck. finra.org/crs_153563.pdf).

Campus Shop and Technology Center 244 Thayer St. Providence, RI 02912 401-863-3168 | ShopBrown.com

Your one-stop shop for Brown apparel and gifts, as well as books, technology, and more!

The Brown Bookstore carries a wide range of great brands including Nike, Champion, Peter Millar, Tommy Bahama, Ivy Citizens, Yeti, Tervis, and Hydroflask.

Shop Green at the Bookstore.

Explore our collections of sustainable merchanidse, including upcycled clothing and accessories from Refried Apparel, recycled glass housewares, and solar-powered headphones.

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