These stories, gathered from this year’s graduating class, demonstrate that the adventure undergraduates face while earning their first collegiate degree contains a novel’s worth of particular joys and disappointments. These accounts are the cheat sheets for just a few. Because what each student brings to Brown is different, each Brown story is unique. In five, ten, fifteen years, or more, students graduating this May may return for reunion weekend to recall again the narrative of their journeys to their undergraduate degrees.

And those narratives will still be vivid, even after fifty years. For most students, what happens between the passage in and then out of the Van Wickle Gates is such a foundational aspect of who they are and will become that its details become a powerful part of the storehouse of memories that will help sustain them for the rest of their lives.

Nifemi Madarikan: The Problem Solver

Renata Mauriz: The Advocate

Tori Kinamon: The Survivor

Austin Martin: The Education MC

Daniel Kunin: The Visualizer

Viet Nguyen: Mr. President

Lehidy Frias: The Cultural Anthropologist

Myacah Sampson: The Activist