Joe Biden campaigned on bipartisanship, on “the spirit of being able to work with one another.” To be frank, that is hardly what we’ve gotten from his presidency thus far, one defined by partisan legislative maneuvering.

Before last March, I had never seen someone open a trash can with their elbows. For whatever reason, that is the detail I visualize when I recall my first impression of what would soon explode into the COVID-19 pandemic:

Hello, my fellow graduates, friends, families, and honored guests. My name is Wassa Bagayoko,  and it is my distinct honor and deep pleasure to address you this morning.

I did not first move into Brown during a pandemic, but I might as well have. As most of us have found ourselves during the past 14 months, in that moment in September 2017, taking my very first steps on College Hill, I was completely alone.

Standing on the threshold of graduation, the path ahead seems rife with uncertainty. In our years at Brown, we’ve spent our time building ourselves into a community that supports, challenges and encourages us. That’s a hard thing to let go of as we leave College Hill behind. 

I was never someone who dreamed of moving to a big city; I remember visiting New York City when I was a kid and hating it. But my excitement to move to Brown stemmed, in large part, from a belief I hadn’t even been conscious of holding: that step one in ‘making it’ was leaving home, and the Midwest, behind.

As a member of the Band — yeah, those sickos who wake you up early every Parent’s Weekend — I’ve heard a lot of Brown school songs (and occasionally remembered how to play them). Our fight song, Ever True to Brown, is fitting for our class of 2021.

In high school, I once joked that I didn’t find out I was Black until my first day of sixth grade.  That is, of course, an exaggeration; my parents and my parents’ parents are Black, and I have never dissociated myself from my identity.

This article is part of the series 2021 Commencement MagazineThe age-old adage states that college is where you find yourself and your people. At 18, I wished fervently to “find myself” falling in love with math, championing the resolution of some low-level environmental issue, graduating with straight A’s in my […]

When I first arrived on Brown’s campus the day of first-year move-in, I wasn’t all that different from any of my peers chaotically flooding the University gates.