Dean finds ‘academic royalty’ in SEAS grads

School of Engineering and Applied Science Class Day speaker Paul Brandt-Rauf may have six degrees from Columbia, but most of the people graduates encounter, he said, aren’t going to care about their level of education.

“People will not care how much you know until they know how much you care,” he said.

On Sunday, Brandt-Rauf—who has been a member of the Columbia faculty for 23 years and serves as dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois—urged SEAS graduates to think of an engineer as “an agent of social justice.” The students in attendance—all of whom were candidates for bachelor’s, master’s, or Ph.D. degrees—should not only focus on efficiency, he said, but also use their talents to “go build a better world.”

SEAS Dean Feniosky Peña-Mora, who is rounding out his first year in the position, instructed the graduates to stand and offer a raucous thank-you to the parents and faculty in attendance.

“Your leadership will result in the betterment of the world,” Peña-Mora told the class. He went on to list a number of SEAS graduates, from Michael Pupin, who developed the transatlantic underwater telegraph, to Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup and this year’s School of International and Public Affairs Class Day speaker. “You are … academic royalty,” he said.

Class representatives also presented the Senior Fund gift, which totaled more than $5,200, reflecting contributions from 88 percent of the senior class. This fell short of the Senior Fund Committee’s lofty goal of a 100 percent contribution rate, but exceeded the monetary goal of $5,000 to set a new record for SEAS.

During his turn at the podium, Daniel Schiavello, SEAS ’75 and president of the SEAS alumni association, quoted Leonardo da Vinci: “People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things. … Now, you are accomplished. You are the people that happen to things.”

But valedictorian Seth Davidovits kept the ceremony light. Pausing often for audience laughter, Davidovits pondered the possibility of the end of the world arriving in 2012.

“My first reaction was to feel sorry for the class of 2013,” he said, before offering related bits of advice to his classmates, such as, “Don’t buy furniture,” because students won’t get enough use out of it in just two years.

Senior Khadijah Ransom said she appreciated Davidovits’ lighthearted address. “The valedictorian was very relatable and made the ceremony interesting,” she said.

For salutatorian Rodney Chang, Class Day was a day for reflection—and, of course, “a time for us to transform from freeloaders into independent adults.”