The University will host a delayed in-person Commencement ceremony for the class of 2020 either this fall, in either September or October 2021 or over Memorial Day weekend in May 2022, according to an email from President Christina Paxson P’19 to members of the class of 2020.

For many seniors, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the shape of their college experience, and for all, it has reshaped the world they will enter after they graduate.

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.

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.