Welcome to Brown! Here’s your room key, your student ID, your mailbox code, and a complementary reusable water bottle. There’s a few places you need to know about before starting that whole “journey of self-discovery” thing they talked about in the college brochures. So, to start, there’s the Sharpe Refectory, and the Sciences Library, and the… Stephen Roberts Campus Center ’92… nobody actually calls any of those things by their real names, though, so don’t worry. I can go over the nicknames and acronyms later, if you want.

Oh, I guess there’s this place called Barus & Holley, too. It’s basically in the middle of nowhere—like, a whole seven minutes away from the Main Green—and I heard it was pretty gray and gloomy. But that’s alright! The only people who really need to go there are engineers, anyway, so you should be fine.

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It’s both so easy and so difficult to look back and reflect upon our freshman year at Brown. Brown, as we’ve all intimately come to understand, is a place where the days seem to trickle by slowly and agonizingly—and yet, simultaneously, it is a place where you can blink for a second too long and somehow wake up as a senior in college on the day of your graduation.

I came from an underfunded public high school just outside of Columbus, Ohio, as the first child of two African immigrants who, despite having both been college-educated in Lebanon and Morocco, had to work at delis and gas stations and fabric wholesale shops as young adults in New York City in order to survive. Going from Brooklyn to Philly, then to Richmond, and finally to Columbus, where I spent my adolescence, I’d grown accustomed to moving around, but nothing could really prepare me for the sorts of experiences I would face upon coming to Brown—particularly, upon entering the Brown School of Engineering, having never taken physics before, having never been away from home by myself, and having so many doubts about my pursing engineering in the first place. But still, I was here—we were here—and we were acutely aware of what we had gotten ourselves into.

Albeit faintly, I still remember the anxious energy of freshman year—of Unit Wars, of Orientation, and of that swelteringly hot move-in day that marked our arrival to this strange and unfamiliar and somehow magical place. I remember poring over class schedules and campus maps with my roommate (who is actually in this room right now, also graduating with an Sc.B in mechanical engineering), remarking about just how far away the engineering building felt from everything else on campus. While it’s true that Barus & Holley seemed like an impossibly long walk from Keeney Quad, this distance that I and many others felt back then was not just because of physical space. As so many of us bowed our heads and pushed through weeks of statics and vector basics and pretending to understand how to use MATLAB, I know that I and many others passed this time toiling alone in our rooms, so used to not having to ask for help from anybody with schoolwork. And in this time, I couldn’t help but feel emotionally distant, as well—as if Barus & Holley was actually a million miles away, and that idea of somehow becoming a legitimate engineer was, in fact, an impossibility.

Slowly but surely, things began to change, as they tend to do. I know for a fact that many of us came in with the skewed, panicked perception that everyone else was fully prepared, perpetually flourishing, and occupying the role of “Happy, Fulfilled Brown Student TM” with impossible ease. But as other students dropped off in waves— switching disciplines, for better or for worse, after being ravaged by ENGN0030, ENGN0040, and ENGN0051—we drew closer to one another, and grew more comfortable with our surroundings, somehow learning to call the formerly-distant Barus & Holley our home. If you weren’t already friends with a person in your class of engineers, it became inevitable that you knew their face from office hours or had perhaps exchanged laughs over post-ENGN0040 cookies and donuts. I don’t know if you all realize it, but that’s not something you get in other departments at Brown.

For those underprepared and well-prepared alike, we made friends, pushed on, and once we’d gotten to the content that nobody has seen in high school, that increasingly comfortable floor dropped out from

underneath us and we found ourselves working in collaboration with the people that we used to think we couldn’t hold a candle to.

But it seemed that, almost as soon as we coalesced into one large community—Brown Engineering, Class of 2017—we gradually settled into different paths and tracks, learned the finer points of our respective fields, and finally got a taste of what it was like to have some sort of say in more than one class on our schedules.

We talk a lot about bonding over suffering, and that is definitely true. When you’ve seen each other at 4 am in the SciLi mezzanine struggling to slop through the rest of the Fourier transforms on your circuits problem set, or while scavenging for food after a SWE event, or unapologetically napping mid-day under the harsh fluorescent lights of the computer lab, you quickly grow comfortable with one another.

But it seems to me that that mentality of “solidarity through survival” does not do justice to the kinds of relationships we’ve forged with one another during our time here at Brown. People joke about engineers being antisocial, but I think there’s something to be said of the ease with which we approach each other to ask for help or provide support, and the intimacy with which our paths have intertwined over the past four years. Given this unusual level of community, one would think that we were all carbon copies of one another, but we all know that that couldn’t be further from the truth. At Brown, everyone is from dramatically different walks of life, and that is only amplified within the School of Engineering. Here, everyone is an engineer, but we’re all other things, too—and our common ground lies in that multiplicity of identities, and mutual appreciation for each other’s diverse talents and perspectives.

As far as shared experiences go, we truly are a transitional class. We saw the last days of the Gate, of the old mailroom, of Sriracha mayo at Jo’s, of the windows in the Barus & Holley computer lab (may they rest in peace). Though we’re of the last few classes of Brown engineers to have experienced the magic of walking through the Manning Walkway double-doors on a perfect spring day or to have known the BDW as a cramped back room in Prince Lab, our “transitional” status means so, so much more than being able to one-up underclassmen in nostalgia Olympics. Though we joke a lot about the little bubble-inside-a-bubble that is Barus & Holley, we were in no way insulated from the changing world around us, and this, Class of 2017, is what made these past four years—our four years—truly powerful. We bore witness to some of the most tumultuous times that our campus has experienced in years, and being the in-between, transitional folk that we are, we were uniquely poised to be able to create meaningful change; at a departmental level, university level, and a global level, we came to understand the importance of having our voices heard, and of shaping our world to be a more tolerant, safe, and accessible place.

We’ve been both agents of change in our communities and subjected to an incredible amount of external change, but we’ve also catalyzed so much growth within one another. I know I’ve learned so, so much from all of you, at least—how to solve problems of all types and how not to crack under immense pressure, of course, but so many other things, too. We’ve learned to be consistent in our units, and show our work, and neatly comment our codes. But we’ve also learned to unselfishly celebrate the successes of others, to pull each other up even when it feels like the world is crumbling around us, and more importantly, that sometimes, it’s very much okay to not be okay.

Beyond the support we’ve established within these walls, our journeys have been shaped by so much external support, whether we realize it or not. We all know the saying that it takes a village to raise a child, after all, and I know that we’ve all had quite the village helping us throughout this entire experience. I know that my own family—my mom, my dad, and my brothers, Sharif and Ayman—have given everything to help me get here, and subsequently motivate me to make it through in one piece. And for those of us who were never supposed to belong at an institution like Brown, there are decades of people who have paved the way for us, and we owe it to them to prop open the doors of opportunity that they were so gracious to hold.

In any case, regardless of the inevitable mixed feelings that people experienced at the beginning of our senior year, it seems to me that, by now, the general sentiment has shifted. We’ve gotten swept up in that headfirst, youthful eagerness that many of us had felt leaving high school—secure in the knowledge that we’ve outgrown this place that we’ve called home, and ready to clumsily slip into the ill-fitting, oversized garb of “real adulthood.” Maybe the ridiculous white board graffiti in the computer lab made me sentimental as I wrote this, but I still don’t know if I’m ready to leave you all just yet. But if graduating means that I get to bear witness to the incredible futures that are ahead of each and every one of you, that sounds like a pretty good deal.

When I thought about how to reflect on our time together, it was hard at first. How do you even begin to write about the four most formative years of your life? The words ended up coming a bit easier than I thought they would, but I think that’s what happens when you talk about something you really love.

To be completely honest, I couldn’t feel more at ease right now, having been blessed with the opportunity to address some of my dearest friends and their loved ones on one of the most pivotal days of our lives. It seems surreal to think that we may never have another day united under these cloudy Providence skies, reveling in everything from the most extraordinary to the most mundane moments spent with one another.

But I couldn’t feel more privileged to have grown into my own alongside you all, Class of 2017. And I can say with confidence that, if I had to do it all over again, there is nobody with whom I would have rather spent this time.