Speakers told graduates to remember the value of the communities they built throughout their time at GW at the Multicultural Student Services Center’s graduation celebration Thursday in the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre.
MSSC staff members distributed gold cords to nearly 100 graduates at the ceremony and offered optional lavender cords, representing the ongoing social justice movement to build acceptance and equality for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Speakers urged students to continually seek challenges and larger purposes in life, using their time at the University to remind them of their capacity to persevere.
Kenneth Forward, a graduating law student and graduate assistant in the MSSC, said students should consider their degrees as “launch pads,” using the academic hurdles they overcame as proof they can follow through on their commitments. He said the students should consider what goals they want to accomplish and how, rather than questioning whether they can accomplish them at all.
He said students will find their purpose through refusing to compromise their values and choosing work that evokes pride and optimism.
“You’ve done the hardest part already — you started with the end in mind and you’ve made it here,” Forward said. “Now, I challenge you to dream a new goal, set a new finish line, one that excites you and also scares you just a little bit, and one that the world genuinely needs you to reach.”
Nigel Walton, the graduate program assistant for the Office of Community, Culture and Inclusion, said the MSSC’s promotion of honesty in its programming made him a “more complete” human being, enabling him to find a connection with people he once felt had no commonality with him. He said students must use their MSSC education about honesty to confront ongoing institutional efforts to defund programs and restrict language promoting diversity, equity and inclusion nationwide.
“Do not let anyone reduce what happened to you in this building into a political talking point,” Walton said. “What happened here was education, real education, the kind that doesn’t just fill your mind, it stretches it, the kind that asks you to sit across from someone whose life looks nothing like yours and find the thread that connects you.”
MSSC Director Vanice Antrum told graduates to reflect throughout graduation week on the impact the center had on them, while recognizing that their presence at the MSSC also left an impression on future students. She said graduates have a supportive alumni network they can rely on, even if they feel uncertain about their post-college futures.
“You are joining a host of MSSC alums who are ready and willing to welcome you with open arms,” she said.
Antrum said Audrey Lorde — an American author and activist who said she was the accumulation of her creative achievements — inspired her to tell graduates to celebrate their degrees but also themselves for putting in the work to earn them.
“Your best work is you, not just the GPA, not just the diploma, not just the accolades, but ‘you,’ the whole full complicated, beautiful version of you that showed up every single day, even when it was hard,” Antrum said.
Senior Chloe Blackburn, an international affairs major, said graduates should let go of their fear of disappointing others and themselves to best love the lives they are currently living. Blackburn thanked the MSSC staff, who she said allowed her to begin letting go of expectations because of the safe and loving environment they consistently provided.
“Her leadership builds these spaces while her love fills them up,” Blackburn said about Antrum. “I have never felt the most safe at GW than I have in her office talking about campus grievances or weekend plans.”
Senior Taiwo Oseni, program assistant at the MSSC, said graduates should also remember the beauty of the community that stemmed from MSSC programming.
“We have shown up for each other in a world that is structured against our identities and a political system that is dedicated on stripping away our rights and our voices,” Oseni said. “Yet through it all, we carry culture, identity, joy and excellence all at once, and we’ve done it all with grace.”
Senior Thomas Morningstar, a women, gender and sexuality studies and political science major, said graduates should focus on taking care of themselves and each other when confronted with large or stressful situations, a lesson they said they learned from feeling the positive impacts of the MSSC caring for them.
“This uncertainty we are all entering, one we cannot solve overnight, but we don’t have to solve it all at once,” Morningstar said. “We can start by taking care of ourselves and each other, just like the MSSC taught me, and sometimes that’s all it takes.”
