President, Vassar Student Association Remarks

Sunday, May 19, 2024
by Olivia Gross ’24, Vassar Student Association President

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our families and professors and friends, thank you all very much for being here, but mainly, welcome to the legendary class of 2024. You all look great.

My name is Olivia, and it is my absolute honor to stand up here today as your student body president. I am filled with gratitude to have this opportunity to address all of you (at my very first graduation).

As part of my mandatory senior spring existential crisis, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to leave a mark here. For some of us, that’s winning academic awards. For others, it’s setting career records in athletics. For others, it’s our art being hung up in the Deece or the class tree we helped plant, or the words we carve into campus picnic tables. When we move out of our THs, TAs, our blue houses, wherever, we may be leaving our material marks behind, but we will be retaining our bond as classmates. We’ve been taking care of each other since our first year, and this will not stop now.

Last Sunday, I went to the farm to see my good friend’s senior project opening. He has spent every Tuesday afternoon this semester working with local high school students to build a community gathering spot in one of the hiking trails. The brightly painted benches, sturdy swing set, and chairs made of repurposed bike tubes were placed with care under the bright green canopy of leaves. The group that did this work jokingly called themselves the “Community Builders”—a name that made me laugh then pause, struck with the understanding of what they had accomplished: yes, a space for anyone to enjoy and the creation of a new community. Seeing the ribbon snipped away from this space felt like an official welcome to our neighbors to join us in this campus, and it was all from my friend’s doing.

My friend has volunteered at a local shelter for unhoused children, he’s helped hundreds of people fix their bikes, and he’s just become a force of community building that Vassar has desperately needed. When we didn’t have late-night dining in our first year, he started VC Late Night Snacks and fed us, hungry for grilled cheese and conversation, every midnight from the Joss kitchen.

I’ve brought up my friend because what I most admire about him is his unequivocal understanding of the importance of community and the unimportance of recognition. So thank you, Karun, for teaching us this.

At Convocation, I set a challenge for us to use our senior year to make new connections both within our Vassar community and with our Poughkeepsie neighbors. I’m happy to report that we’ve made significant progress in that. We’ve been more open, more friendly, more forgiving, and more connected as a class than ever before.

This year, one of the ways that we have come together as individuals has been through activism work on campus. On September 13, hundreds of students wore red and stood outside of Taylor Hall, chanting in support of the female professors who had just filed a lawsuit for fair wages. The moment that the professors walked out was unifying.

Last month, the encampment set up on Library Lawn in solidarity with Palestine and other student-led demonstrations across the world proved that peaceful action can lead to tangible outcomes. The way that students were able to interact with community members within that space was a reminder of the importance of building connections with our neighbors.

It’s a shame that it took so long for those connections to finally form. But we can learn from that, and from my friend, and we can move forward with assurance in who we are and pride in what we can accomplish.

Since we first stepped foot on campus, in August of 2020, we were already set to be a historic class. We had spent the previous five months in lockdown. And then we were suddenly here.

I didn’t really want to talk about our COVID times today—I know most of us are used to repressing those memories—but being members of what is unfortunately called the “COVID class” is an important part of who we were, who we are, and who we will become. We spent an incredibly formative year going to classes in outdoor tents. We had our brains poked with a Q-Tip every other week in the Aula. We formed strong connections with a few people and wished we could forge bonds with dozens more. Some of us spent several weeks in that charming Hampton Inn. It feels like an alien time.

I mean, Founder’s Day was the first time we could go outside without masks—we were already walking around in a certain state all day, so getting jump-scared by our classmates’ surprising chins definitely had us wishing everyone would put their masks back on.

But in all seriousness, this sucked. We complained about it. We felt like our college experiences were being stolen. But what was really happening was that we were given a unique opportunity to redefine what our college years would be like—not only for us but for every forthcoming class at Vassar. Because we didn’t know what life here was supposed to be like, we created our own way of life … and that’s our legacy.

So even though we didn’t sign up for this, we rose to the challenge. We got through this time, and we didn’t just get through it, we excelled. We are leaving this place in an extraordinarily different state than the one we arrived in. We’ve enjoyed the Halloweekend tent for three years, we saw Ballentine Field be blasted into smithereens, we rang the bell on top of Main, we had the best Senior Week in years. And we know to not take these things for granted.

Let’s take this with us. Let’s take what we have learned from our incredible professors about critical thinking, being passionate about our scholarship, and wanting to share our knowledge with the curious minds around us.

We can advocate for what is right, we can urge those in power to divest from the military-industrial complex, we can donate to causes that we care about, we can rise to the occasion, we can build new communities and nurture existing ones, we can continue to show up for each other.

We can remember what we have created for ourselves and how we managed to turn a rough start into an unbeatable four years. We can recognize the magnitude of what we’ve accomplished. We can celebrate each other and we can celebrate what we have done here—we, together, have made this a college experience to be proud of.

I’m proud of you. I’m proud of me. I’m proud of us. I’ll see all of you in Brooklyn. Stay Gross. Thank you so much.