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[AUDIO LOGO] ["POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE" PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
ALYSSA APSEL: Good afternoon, and welcome to the ECE Commencement Recognition Ceremony for 2024. We are delighted to have all of you here today.
For many, the last year has been both challenging and exciting. For the class of 2024 in particular, the last four years has been challenging and exciting. This is the class that did not have a high school graduation. Some of our graduate students didn't have a college graduation. This is the class that learned the true meaning of the word "unpredictable," going from a once in a generation pandemic to a very tumultuous time for American universities.
Nevertheless, you have all made it through to this incredible moment. And I, for one, am both honored and delighted to be back here. My predecessor used to say that this is, without question, the happiest time of the year in Ithaca. And he was right. The graduates have reached the end of a great and successful journey. And we are here to honor them in the presence of our friends and family from all over the world.
People have come from almost every corner of the globe to celebrate our new graduates. We thank all of you for traveling so far to join us in the celebration, and we know this is not a small thing. All the faculty, myself included, share in your excitement. And it has been a really fun year.
Let me quickly introduce the faculty present here today sitting on the stage with me. Please stand up when I introduce you. Hunter Adams.
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José Martinez.
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Grace Xing.
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Peter Jessel.
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Lang Tong.
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Amit Lal.
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Edwin Kan.
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Amal El-Ghazaly.
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Joe Skovira.
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Zhiru Zhang.
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Adrian Sampson.
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Peter Doerschuk.
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Kirstin Petersen.
[CHEERING]
Khurram Afridi.
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Farhan Rana.
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Francesco Monticone.
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And Aaron Wagner.
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Not only is this an amazing opportunity to be here together in celebration after many years of challenging work, but it's also a chance for us to look forward into the future. And what does that future look like? Well, if we can judge from this class, our future looks bright.
You are definitely not the same graduates as 30 years ago. For one thing, about 40% of our graduates are women. My class had two graduating women. Two.
[APPLAUSE]
This group also hails from more than 15 different countries. And this class has a definite creative streak, as evidenced by their work and commitment in managing things like the maker lab, organizing department tours, and working on various project teams as well as numerous class projects. They have completed projects that include a number of examples that interface both the technical and the artistic, like a drawing robot, a musical conductor baton, a really beautiful, in my opinion, re-envisioning of the Olin Library Clock, for one, a set of air drums. This is just a few of the examples of projects that you guys have done. The students have built all sorts of flying, sensing amazing systems to make the world better, or at least more interesting.
And in the words of Henry Petroski, known as the poet laureate of engineering, "Science is about knowing. Engineering is about doing." Later today, we will assemble with all of Cornell in a spectacular ceremony to convey, officially, to the graduates their degrees with all of the due pomp and honor. Now, however, we want to focus the celebration on our ECE graduates. We are a unique bunch.
To our graduates-- after an intense period of study, you have finally arrived at graduation and you're now officially engineers. Yay. [CHUCKLES]
[APPLAUSE]
I don't have to tell you that it wasn't easy to get here. ECE has a reputation as the hardest major in the colonies. You graduates have arrived here today through persistence, hard work, a lot of sweat, and a lot of drive. You have taken many rigorous courses spanning the universe of knowledge from electrical science. And you have mastered things like lab equipment and measurement. You have published scholarly discovery. And some of you have even constructed amazing devices that address all sorts of societal issues.
Whether it was your struggle through learning circuit design in ECE 4530 or microcontroller design in ECE 4760, maybe it was your M.Eng project or finally writing up that never ending thesis, submitting the last papers, you've had to overcome something. Your creativity shows a good mix of irreverence, thoughtfulness, empathy for others, and cleverness.
Amidst all of this, we hope you managed to have fun and managed to graduate, which is a major success and accomplishment. You're now experts in things like Fermi levels, cache coherence, Laplace transforms, state functions, Miller multiplication, Green's functions, and a lot of other things that if you tell people in the outside world, they're going to think you're making them up.
To the friends and family members here today, I want you to know that these students have worked very hard. It's one of the most distinguishing aspects of the Cornell degree. Cornell students really know how to work. So in that spirit, let's look at the past few years and then anticipate what lies ahead of you.
A question that many of us hear all the time from students when they're confronting a challenging lesson is, will I use this? After putting in tons of time and effort, students, perhaps rightly, want to believe that everything they learn and every second that they spend in lab can be monetized, and all of that time is completely well spent, that we can somehow predict the exact future utility of every second spent in the lab.
And so we tell them, yes, you will use it. You will use it all, all the time. Sure. But how can we ultimately what you will use and what will be useful? It's not that we are misrepresenting the utility of linear systems theory, because I personally think it is incredibly useful. It's more that great innovations typically come from unexpected places.
How many people here have heard of Claude Shannon? OK. I see hands raised over here, not so much over there. So you may not have heard of him, but you know his work. He's one of the most famous mathematicians and electrical engineers credited with foundational concepts that bits carry information. And as a result of his work, he's known as the father of information theory and also considered by many to be the founder of artificial intelligence.
Interestingly enough, if you read his early history, this essential realization, the one that binary digits carried information, it did, in fact, come from a class. But not the class that you would think. This realization came from an elective class he took at the University of Michigan, Philosophy 33-- Introduction to Logic, a class that he took because he was interested in it, not because he thought it would help him to understand vacuum tubes or whatever was the cool new technology in 1935.
So it's not a huge leap to say that in an unexpected turn of lateral thinking, an engineer taking a philosophy class laid the groundwork for modern computing and communications. Likewise, there are other examples of this. Steve Jobs dropped out of college, but he continued to take classes at Reed College. One of those classes he took was calligraphy. Apparently, he became pretty interested in this-- so interested, in fact, that when his team developed the Macintosh, he wanted it to be more than just a functional computer. His experience with the art and typography of arranging writing inspired him to incorporate this beautiful typography into the design of the Macintosh.
This, of course, became a major differentiator for the company. And they're largely the same fonts that we all use today. Again, he didn't take a calligraphy course thinking with the goal in mind that this was going to be useful. He took it because he wanted to take it, because it was interesting. So where am I going with this? Good question.
The truth is that we don't know what you will use because the world is changing. And hopefully, this is what ECE at Cornell has prepared you for because we want you to change the world. And as you know, the world is really uncertain. So trying to plot out exactly everything that will ultimately be useful is impossible and also, more importantly, not much fun. You need to have some of that.
So the good news is this class has mastered the uncertainty part and can turn that into an asset and a tool for innovation. So try also to have a little fun. All of that seemingly superfluous stuff that might make you actually a better engineer, and it will certainly make you a more complete person. So while we have no idea what the future will bring you, even when we pretend that we do, we know that you are better prepared because you have really good brains that have been forced to think about a lot of different things that you might use or might not.
So that being said, the good news is that you are done working on incredibly hard homework assignments, at least for now, research missions, and final projects. And you are now also more capable than most of your peers in the workplace to make a better world. You also join an illustrious tradition of more than 100 years of Cornell ECE graduates.
Cornell was the first university in the world to offer the electrical engineering degree. Electrical engineering started right here at Cornell. And today is the 139th commencement of this school. You are now members of the longest EE tradition in the world.
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It is by no means a fluke that we were first. The University was founded on the earnings of Ezra Cornell that he made from Western Union, which was the first telecommunications company, which seems apropos considering that we're graduating in ECE today. Ezra Cornell used his fortune to endow a university here in his hometown of Ithaca, New York. And we are all at Cornell today entirely because of the telegraph and the first electrical communications networks.
Developing the telegraph led to the field of electrical science. And as a result, in 1833, Cornell created the first degree in electrical engineering. We were then housed in Franklin Hall, which was named, appropriately, for the first electrical engineer, Benjamin Franklin. And it's now called Tjaden Hall, and it's over by the art museum. In the 1950s, we got modern and apparently decided that we wanted to be in a building that looked like a junior high school.
So we moved into Phillips Hall. I'm happy to say that when you come back in five years for your fifth reunion, thanks to a generous donor, we may have modernized it.
[CHEERING]
So now your class is off to a future that Ezra would never have dreamed of-- a future of robots and of artificial intelligence, of wireless communications, and self-driving electric cars, quantum computing, and wearable devices. It's your turn to lead us in the next 30 years, wherever they may take us, with your innovations, successes, and failures, and advice for the next generation. Everyone here is proud of you, but they're also counting on you to carry the history of Cornell forward proudly.
So let's finish up here. You have your cap on and your gown on, and you're thinking it's all over. But remember, your official graduation doesn't occur until later today when the president proclaims your rights, duties, and responsibilities of your degree. Congratulations to all of you, all of you graduates. You have been fantastic. You've learned how to work hard, how to manage your time, how to solve problems. And you've kept your sense of humor and maybe even gotten some sleep. Congratulations. Best of luck to all of you.
[CHEERING]
So now we will proceed with the ceremony.
SPEAKER 1: Good morning, everybody. I will be reading the names of the graduating seniors as they come and pick up their certificate.
[? Jukwa ?] Mahkah Devi.
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Afua Ansah.
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Veda Balte.
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Nadia Barakatain.
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Bhadra Bejoy.
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Pelham Bergesen.
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Maria Boza.
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William Buchanan.
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Jessie Chen.
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[? Yiju ?] Chen.
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Sebastian Clavijo.
[CHEERING]
Avery Colburn.
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Leo Davies.
[CHEERING]
Filipe dos Santos Branco.
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Adeniyi Fagbewesa.
[CHEERING]
Katherine Ana Fernandes.
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Tomas Figura.
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Sophia Franklin.
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Jonas Funk.
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Max Garval.
[CHEERING]
Devin Gordon.
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Luke Gorg.
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Sabian Grier.
[CHEERING]
Kevin Guo.
[CHEERING]
Tiffany Guo.
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Ashley Heckman.
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Jessica Henson.
[CHEERING]
[? Gaurav ?] Inder.
[CHEERING]
[INDISTINCT CHEERS]
Maxwell Klugherz.
[CHEERING]
Ryan Kolm.
[CHEERING]
Stephen Lambert.
[CHEERING]
Becky Lee.
[CHEERING]
Madeleine Lee.
[CHEERING]
Erica Li.
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Annabel Lian.
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Zi Liang.
[CHEERING]
[? Lawrence ?] Liu.
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Aidan McNay.
[CHEERING]
I should also mention Aidan is a Merrill's Presidential Scholar this year.
[CHEERING]
Andrea Miramontes Serrano.
[CHEERING]
Charlie Mueller.
[CHEERING]
Waving Nelson Ooi.
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Jacob Revelo.
[CHEERING]
Ignacio Romo.
[CHEERING]
Audrey Sackey.
[CHEERING]
Gabriel Seger.
[CHEERING]
Schuyler Seyram.
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Emily Speckhals.
[CHEERING]
Jack Strope.
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Eric Sun.
[CHEERING]
[? Cheng ?] Tang.
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Gabe Taylor.
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Ian Thomas.
[CHEERING]
Evan Williams.
[CHEERING]
Michael Wu.
[APPLAUSE]
And we have one more presidential scholar coming up. Ambrose Yang.
[CHEERING]
William Yuan.
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Ashley Zhang.
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Kathryn Zang.
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Katherine Zhou.
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SPEAKER 2: Thanks. All these tall guys. That's better. Yeah.
It's my pleasure to announce the Master of Engineering recipients today. So Siddhant Ahlawat.
[CHEERING]
Congratulations. Atahan Aksaray.
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Asna Altaf.
[CHEERING]
Christopher Bakhos.
[CHEERING]
Rochelle Barsz.
[CHEERING]
Kathleen Beyer-- Baur.
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Guadalupe Bernal.
[CHEERING]
Michael Awad.
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Raleigh Clemens.
[CHEERING]
Spencer Davis.
[CHEERING]
[? Naveed ?] Desai.
[CHEERING]
Alexander Drazic.
[APPLAUSE]
Rahul Goel.
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[? Waming ?] He.
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Thank you. [? Zongmin ?] Huang.
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[? Shuxian ?] Jiang.
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[? Franshen ?] Kang.
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Liam Kain.
[CHEERING]
[? Kishore ?] Kannan.
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Jacob Lashin.
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Thank you.
[? Ximing ?] Lin.
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[? Zaifu ?] Loy.
[CHEERING]
[? Quan ?] Xiang-- Chen.
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Hannah Nicholson.
[CHEERING]
Nikhil Pillai.
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Miriya Pinkerman.
[CHEERING]
Aditi Rao.
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Wenchen [? Ma. ?]
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Teppei Matsutake.
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Oh, yeah. Nikhil Mhatre.
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OK. Harris William Miller.
[CHEERING]
Zachary Nelson.
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Syed Askari Raza.
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Eshita Sangani.
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Joash Shankar.
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Devin Singh.
[CHEERING]
Tafadar Soujad.
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Jacob Tamor.
[CHEERING]
Allison Virgo.
[CHEERING]
[? Idu ?] O. Wang.
[APPLAUSE]
[? Harun ?] Shuwa.
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Socrates Wong.
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Brandon Wood.
[CHEERING]
Kaixin Yang.
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[? Hongyu ?] Yao.
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[? Hi. ?] Yixin Zang.
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[? Jyiang ?] Zhang.
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[? Qi ?] Zhang-- Zheng.
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[? Yuzong ?] Zhou.
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Ruyi Zhou.
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Thank you. Chris Yang.
[CHEERING]
Ang Chen.
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Sanath Kumar.
[APPLAUSE]
Steven Zheng.
[CHEERING]
Pawan Perera.
[APPLAUSE]
[? Harun ?] Sanat.
[CHEERING]
Ketul Mehta.
[CHEERING]
Sona Susan Jacob.
[CHEERING]
Hardik Hedaoo.
[CHEERING]
Ding Yang.
[CHEERING]
[? Yen-Hsing ?] Li.
[APPLAUSE]
Carol Zhao.
[CHEERING]
And last but not least, Koushani Das.
[CHEERING] Thank you all. And congratulations to the massive engineering class of 2024.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: That's good. That's good. I will now be announcing the names of the recipients of the doctor of philosophy degree, which is the highest degree that this department awards. In addition to the student who will come up to the stage, we'll also have the advisor come and hood the student. We'll begin with the first candidate as they walk up.
Maida Farooq.
[CHEERING]
Yuetao Hou.
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[? Sounak ?] Maji.
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Alexandra Gallyas Sanhueza.
[APPLAUSE]
Nikhil Ravi.
[CHEERING]
Tuan Ta.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Yuan ?] Suong Zu.
[APPLAUSE]
Thomas Conroy.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Landon ?] Ivy.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
Kailin Yang.
[APPLAUSE]
Mohamed Abdelrahman.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Zeki ?] Hayran.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Dana ?] Ma.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Junguan ?] Li.
[APPLAUSE]
[? Neil ?] Adit.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Ahmad ?] Al-Ahmad.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Chenyi ?] Wang.
[APPLAUSE]
[? Chenwe ?] Dong.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Betian ?] Ban.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[? Xiaoji ?] Shang.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
And last but not least, Yixin Zang.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
Congratulations to the PhD class of 2024.
[CHEERING]
ALYSSA APSEL: So what an exciting ceremony this has been. You are all now one step closer to your graduation. You just have to get through the rest of the day, and then you're done. Please try to enjoy with your families the rest of this absolutely beautiful, stunning weekend. We're all-- I speak for on behalf of the entire faculty to say that we're all incredibly proud of everything that you've accomplished.
Hooray. [CHUCKLES]
[APPLAUSE]
And that means you're free to go.
