One of those undergraduates was Lindsay Dieudonné, BA ’23, the student speaker at the College of Arts & Sciences ceremony. “Who would have thought we would have been graduating with the Marty Walsh?” she joked to her classmates. “He missed a few discussion posts, but that’s OK—we’ll talk later!”
Dieudonné also encouraged graduates to “remember your story and be yourself loudly. You have the power to change institutions, redirect history, and call down principalities through the voice that you were given alone.”
Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, as well as a recognized authority on voting rights and election law, received an honorary Doctor of Law degree at the Law School ceremony. Abe Ceesay, MBA '05, CEO of Rapport Therapeutics, received an honorary Doctor of Commercial Science degree at the Sawyer Business School ceremony.
Ceesay—who also serves as chair of Life Science Cares, an industry organization working to alleviate the impacts of poverty—urged students to make sure their dreams were big enough to include others. “Where a network is required to drive action but none exists, be the start of one,” he said. “Where there is an issue to which little attention paid, shine a light. Identify outsiders and transform them into insiders.”
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Commencement speakers included Abe Ceesay (third photo from bottom), former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (second photo from bottom), and Janai Nelson (bottom photo).
noteworthy
“No matter how uncertain the world is right now, or your life is right now, don’t limit yourself in what comes next. Go for that next dream, and get ready to dream even bigger.”
Those were the marching orders that the Honorable Martin J. Walsh—executive director of the National Hockey League Players’ Association, as well as the former US labor secretary and Boston mayor—gave to graduates at Suffolk’s 2023 Commencement, held under cloudless skies May 21 at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion.
During separate ceremonies for the Sawyer Business School, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Law School, Suffolk conferred a total of 1,969 undergraduate and advanced degrees to graduates from 37 states and the US Virgin Islands, and from 74 different countries. Almost 30% of Suffolk’s 944 undergraduate degree recipients were first-generation college students.
