Maggie Barnard, student speaker elected by the MPP and MPA classes of 2021, speaks during the 2021 Ford School Commencement.
Transcript:
Congratulations, class of 2021! Those of us
who crawled, sprinted, or glided across the
finish line—I'm not sure who glided but
I’m jealous—we did it! Many of us experienced
two different graduate school lives. One where
we sat wide-eyed, shoulder-to-shoulder in
Annenberg, participating in hypothetical policy
exercises. And another, where we sat with
terror in our eyes, in front of a screen,
miles apart, as our exercises turned into
reality, and we scrambled to analyze the life-or-death
policy decisions happening in real time. Before
we entered the “real” world, the real
world came to us, and brought with it painful
reckonings: We faced a once-in-a-century health
pandemic where weak US policy sacrificed lives.
We witnessed the weight of our leadership’s
discriminatory rhetoric as Asian Americans
are attacked. We watched Americans finally
realize that white supremacy continues to
suppress Black lives. We may not have been
prepared for this, but crisis mode forced
us to adapt and act. Uncertainty became our
constant companion both in our school and
personal lives, but because of the challenges
we encountered, we’ve already learned to
meet some of the world’s biggest problems
before ever leaving a classroom. When the
COVID-19 campus response was insufficient
and Black lives were—and continue to be—at
stake, we went on strike. When the nation
pleaded for poll workers, we showed up. When
elderly were at risk, we volunteered at vaccine
clinics. Many of you did these things while
combating your own personal struggles, whether
it be facing mental illness in isolation or
caring for sick loved ones. But when our peers
were burnt out, we called them and carried
them. We didn’t prepare to meet these trials
during graduate school. But how the class
of 2021 adapted and innovated over the past
year has equipped us to meet the challenges
of our day and more. And how we met those
challenges has prepared us to enter a workforce
that has always very much modeled the past
academic year: messy and uncertain. Soon we
will enter spaces where the efficacy of our
policy isn’t determined by a letter grade
but by its lived impact. We have the policy
tools, and if we endured and accomplished
all of this in crisis, imagine our impact
over the next years, decades, with our newfound
clarity and conviction. Any other year, we’d
ask ourselves: has school prepared us for
the real world? But this year we ask: How
will we prepare the world to heal? Go blue.