Here we are: Commencement. The capitalization seems unnecessary. We are always ending and starting anew, every day of the week — we know this already.
But Commencements and commencements are not events we take for granted. For many of us, graduating from a school like Brown was at some point in our lives inconceivable. All of us have gotten here through some combination of good luck, hard work and a thicket of people standing beside us.
“Hasn’t the time just flown by?” everybody asks these days. Perhaps it has in some ways, but the past four years at Brown also feel heavy in our memory. We’ve had a myriad of controversies, tragedies and changes — more than our share, it seems, though who can really tell? Each of us has only four years here. (Or 4.5, or five. It’s Brown, after all.) In this magazine, our last product as Herald editors, we did not shy away from some of the debates still swirling around campus, like preventing sexual assault, creating safe spaces and blurring the boundaries of a traditional college education.
Yet amid all the collective rumbles and rancor, roughly 1,600 of us have also been molding and remolding individual lives in about as many different directions. That’s reflected in these pages, too: 13 seniors look back and tell stories in the Voices of 2015 section. And the Senior Survey offers some unscientific insight into what we’ve smoked, who we’ve slept with, where we come from and where we’re headed next.
Anyway, it’s night before it’s afternoon, and December is here before it’s June. But before we scatter to all corners of the globe (read: a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn), before we set out on paths away from Brown and each other, we have this weekend to celebrate. Congrats, 2015.
