As prepared for delivery at the 2026 Commencement of Franklin & Marshall College

We commence. Commencement is an interesting word in that it signals the start — the Big Bang of something — and yet, we use it when we graduate. 

I remember commencing my life at college, at the tree right in front of the Diplomatic Café. It was time to separate. 

“Goodbye, Dad.” 

He would go back to Greece, where I come from, and I would go to my dorm. 

I was smiling so much, so much I could not hold it. “I love you and I will miss you,” I said, and as I turned my head away, I left a tear to fertilize the tree. 

I commenced my research when I visited the office of Professor Trainor to ask to get involved in his research — Professor Trainor, as my academic father, has shaped my academic and life trajectory. 

I commenced my philosophical thinking by visiting Professor Hartman’s office hours and my curiosity in graphic literature talking with Professor Wright. 

I cultivated my creative writing skills with Professor Montemarano, my understanding of economics by talking with Professor Maynard, and the structures of origami materials with Professor Hull. 

These and many more professors constitute truly my academic family — my home away from home.

Leaving my country for a better future, the sleepless nights on campus, the physics club, the math club, analyzing the light from faint galaxies, testing the properties of an origami pattern — all make me say today: 

Dad, Mom — we made it. 

Class of 2026,

We grew together — in knowledge and in character — at the Writers House, at Hackman, Stager, Harris, LSP, at our College Houses, at the Winter Visual Arts center. And every time we entered these spaces, they were different, because we were different. 

The exact same seat we didn’t notice we kept choosing. Being sure we belonged somewhere with a simple swipe of our IDs to enter it. The walk that everyone has taken alone — after a bad grade, after calling home. 

We made choices every single day of our college lives. 

And let me do a small calculation. Today, we are more than 400 graduates. If each of us made at least 1,000 meaningful choices, that is nearly half a million parallel universes created within this campus. 

I once wrote an email I never sent. I was often exchanging philosophical ideas with Professor Hartman — but this one, I kept. I kept it for a moment like this.

Part of it says: 

I feel the campus is different at night. 

Walking back from the Writers House to Ware College House at 2:17 AM, after finishing my studying, the space feels empty. No one there. No cars. No sound. 

I just walk — looking forward, then up at the sky, cloudy or not — and I pretend I see stars that I do not. I look at some of the 120 different species of trees on this campus, and they look beautiful in a quiet, almost unreal way. 

The lamps illuminate just enough so that I can see half of the view, and imagine how I want the other half to look when I wake up tomorrow. 

Maybe I regret some choices. Maybe I do not. Maybe I am excited, or maybe I am skeptical. It does not matter. 

After this walk, I go back home changed. 

Dear Classmates, 

We leave this home changed.

We commence — not just a graduation, but a beginning. 

And we will be successful. But success, at least to me, is not a title or a destination. It is the satisfaction of who we have become along the way — the values we hold, and the ones we choose to represent when no one is watching. 

For me, success might look like this: being excited because a single pixel in a dataset could be oxygen in a galaxy billions of light-years away. 

And as we all leave this place — the union of all these spaces that made Franklin & Marshall our moment of transformation — we step forward into jobs, into opportunities, carrying something far greater: a way of thinking, a way of questioning, a way of seeing the world shaped by the conversations we had, the collaborations we built, and the friendships that will outlast all of this. 

We move forward with resilience, with passion, with integrity — with the growth that formed who we are. 

And so, by that definition — 

we have already succeeded. 

We have succeeded not because of what we are about to do, but because of who we are now.

And wherever we go next— whether we walk through familiar doors or entirely new ones— we will carry with us every version of ourselves that was shaped here.

So let us go forward, not just to build our futures, 

but to imagine them— again and again— 

until we create something worthy of all those possibilities. 

Class of 2026 — 

we commenced long ago. 

Today, we continue. 

Congratulations!