A transcript of the 2015 Commencement address delivered by Manjul Bhargava,Ěýwinner of the 2014 Fields Medal for mathematics and a professor at Princeton University.

President Clayton Spencer, Trustees, fellow honorary degree recipients, the professors and administrators and staff of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College who are present here today, and of course, most importantly, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ graduating class of 2015 and families. Congratulations and thank you so much. It’s such a great pleasure and honor to be here at this wonderful and storied liberal arts college on this grand occasion. I have to say I am such a big fan of all the honorary degree recipients that are here today — Mark Abelson, Thomas Moser, and Joan Benoit Samuelson — it’s really a true honor to be among them.

And it’s a real pleasure and honor to be giving this Commencement address on this occasion. It’s not often that a mathematician is asked to give a commencement address — perhaps this is for good reason! I suspect that when you all exited your last class here at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and were getting ready for graduation, you probably weren’t thinking, “I wish I could have had one more math class!” In case you were thinking this, your dream has just come true. No, I’m just kidding. I won’t be giving a math lecture today.

But I thought I would say a few words about some of those things that inspired me to go into mathematics and about some of the things that inspired today’s honorary degree recipients to do what they’re doing. And hopefully what will inspire many of you to do what you will eventually do.

Namely, I wanted to say a few words about the numerous remarkable relationships among different fields of human endeavor, the relationships that exist between mathematics and art, between sciences and the humanitiesĚý— and more generally the surprising unity of all fields of human endeavor and what this all means in terms of the value of a liberal arts education, such as the one you received here at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. It’s something that I really believe you are so lucky and blessed to be walking out with today.

As you all know so well, liberal arts education allows one to learn and think critically across a wide range of disciplines. Of course, the overly pragmatic skeptic will always ask “But why do I need to know about disciplines that have nothing to do with the job that I’ll eventually work in?” Well, there are lots of answers to this question.

A liberal arts education allows one to learn and think critically across a wide range of disciplines.

First – and perhaps most importantlyĚý— it enriches your life; it makes life so much more interesting when you can appreciate worlds that are outside your own. But secondly, you never actually know what your job is going to be, or what your work will entail. Our own Joan Benoit Samuelson was a marathon runnerĚý— an Olympic gold medalistĚý— but what she has done since then for young women, for children in general, and for the environmentĚý— all her vast philanthropic workĚý— is even more impactful than her Olympic gold medal or her world records.

Our own Thomas Moser was a tenured associate professor here at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ of rhetoric, and was the director of debate, before he became one of the world’s most artistic and beautiful furniture makers. As journalist Fareed Zakaria,Ěý who is a former Commencement speaker here, has emphasized many times, a liberal arts education prepares you not just for your first job, but for your second job and your third job and your fourth job and beyond.

And thirdly, even if you do know what your job will be for the rest of your life, you still never know when certain ideas and concepts from other disciplines might make an appearance in what you’re doing, in a way that could totally transform the work that you are doing or at least improve what you are doing.

Our own Dr. Mark Abelson here is a wonderful example of this. Dr. Abelson obtained several of his critical breakthroughs in ophthalmology by applying creative problem solving methods across a diverse range of disciplines including pharmacology, pathophysiology, economics, chemistry, cellular biology, and more. Indeed, many of the world’s greatest innovations and breakthroughs have occurred due to such cross-fertilization of ideas across seemingly different fields.

X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, and lasers in medicine all originally came about due to physicists and space scientists thinking about these things for completely different reasons. In some cases, the immediate purpose was just to have fun and play around, which is what pure scientists generally are doing. Radiocarbon dating in archaeology, anthropology, and history is another example where ideas from physics and chemistry resulted in a revolution in fields that seemed completely different.

One of the main interests of mine, music, is another subject that has had incredibly interesting influences from many areas: psychology, physiology, sociology, engineering, physics, and mathematics. The choices of frequencies that sound good in music are governed by mathematical principles; two notes sound good together if their frequencies occur in a simple whole number ratio like 2:1, which is called an octave in music, or 3:2 which is called a fifth in music. These simple whole number ratios are what sound good to the human ear.

Many of the world’s greatest innovations and breakthroughs have occurred due to such cross-fertilization of ideas across seemingly different fields.

And so the manner in which these different notes were chosen in different musical cultures around the world, and how scales of entire notes were chosen in different musical cultures were chosen, they were chosen by basically the solution to a mathematical problem. How can you choose a set of notes so that all ratios of those frequencies that are occurring are simple whole number ratios? It’s a problem in number theory. And different solutions were obtained across different cultures. And that’s how music developed all around the word in different traditions.

I always found the study of this problem and its solutions through the ages, absolutely fascinating. For me personally, it is such unexpected connections, with art of all things, that brought me into mathematics in the first place.

In school, mathematics is usually grouped together with the sciences. But a lot of people don’t know that mathematics actually has a lot of its origins in music, in poetry, and the arts in general. These amazing connections are part of the reason I personally became interested in mathematics and ever since then, it has been one of my goalsĚý— one of my dreams — to get more young people interested in mathematics, not just through the sciences, but through the arts, through poetry, through music, through magic.

The reason it happened to me is that my grandfather was a scholar of Sanskrit and so a lot of what I learned about mathematics as a child was through what my grandfather taught me about the rhythms of Sanskrit poetry. The scientific setup of Sanskrit, both phonetically and poetically, naturally led early poets and linguists to consider various mathematical and scientific questions that one might not immediately expect from a poet.

There were, for example, questions relating to how many poetic meters there were of different types, how one could improvise on these meters and on these rhythms, and how one could use mathematical principles to memorize really long rhythms.

As a result, central concepts in mathematics, such as recurrent sequences like Fibonacci numbers, binomial coefficients, generative algorithms, memory wheels, and more, were first discovered in history in the context of poetry. And that made learning math so much fun for me, coming from an initial interest in poetry.

A lot of what I learned about mathematics as a child was through what my grandfather taught me about the rhythms of Sanskrit poetry.

The divide between poetry and math, at that time, was so thin that essentially all mathematics was actually written in poetry at the time. And a lot of poetry was written about mathematics. Some of these poems were full of vivid imagery of nature, and animals, and beautiful stories. And when reading some of these poems, which I often did as a child with my grandfather, often at the end one would realize that one had been tricked into learning a mathematical theorem, or had been asked a mathematical question that you couldn’t get your mind off afterwards and you had to solve.

I’ll give you an example. Here’s such a poem from Bhaskara’s Lilavati from the year 1150. It goes like this:

“The square root of half the number of bees has gone to a shrub of jasmine; and another eight-ninths of the whole swarm has gone there too; a female bee is buzzing towards a male bee that is itself buzzing within a lotus, having been allured to it by its fragrance at night. Tell me, O lovely maiden, the number of bees.”

In case you’re wondering, the answer is 72 bees.

These stories really inspired me when I was growing up because they were wonderful examples of simple ideas in one subject that eventually grew into concepts so omnipresent, important, and deep in another, in this case it was simple ideas in poetry, that led to deep and lasting ideas in mathematics.

These ideas are still used in breakthroughs today. So these stories illustrated and unravelled for me the beautiful and surprising connections among different realms of thought. And such stories still happen today. A lot.

Steve Jobs was famous for his ideas for products that married top-notch aesthetics with top-notch engineering. When asked about why the Macintosh computer revolutionized computing, he remarked, “I think part of what made the Macintosh so great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” Many of the world’s greatest new companies and startups continue to follow this line of thinking, this marriage of different disciplines to achieve greater heights.

Creativity and technical know-how are both needed in this world, and are needed together.

I want to end with one last example that’s particularly relevant this week. One of my inspirations in graduate school, who later became a colleague, and in more recent years, someone I called my good friend, Professor John Nash and his wife Alicia, were killed in a car crash earlier this week.

It’s been an extremely devastating moment for all those who knew him, as well as for all those who knew his work, which is of course much of the world due to his tremendous creative influence across disciplines, as well as due to the movie that was loosely based on his life.

Professor Nash really personifies the notion that a simple idea in one subject can have profound effects on other areas. Despite all the hardships that he had to endure, and that we all at Princeton watched him endure, Professor Nash pursued what he enjoyed most: mathematics.

His theory of non-cooperative games — he was playing games for a living — and his theory of what’s now called the Nash equilibrium, was not only a work of technical mastery in mathematics, but also contained extremely artistic, creative ideas and constructions that were inspired by phenomena in neighboring disciplines. As a result, his work has had major influences on numerous subjects including economics, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, law, diplomacy, and politics.

We will truly miss Professor Nash, but it’s obvious from the work that he did for all of us that his legacy will live on strongly and forever. His story, and all the stories that I’ve mentioned today, clearly show that creativity and technical know-how are both needed in this world, and are needed together, and creativity or inspiration often comes from the connections, relations, and analogies that one sees with other subjects.

This is precisely why scientists ought to know about arts and the humanities, and similarly why artists and humanists should know about science. More precisely, that’s why it’s helpful for mathematicians to know about poetry and music; why it is helpful for sportspersons to know about environmental science and child welfare; why it is helpful for professors of rhetoric to know about woodworking; and why it’s so useful for doctors to know about economics in addition to the more traditional subjects for them like chemistry and biology; and why it can be useful for economists, biologists, and politicians to know about mathematics. And this is really what’s behind the value of a liberal arts education.

So, like Professor Nash and all the other wonderful people I’ve mentioned, find something that you really enjoy. In fact, find two or three or four or more things that you really enjoy and do them. Keep learning about other disciplines.

And don’t just appreciate the connections between different realms of human endeavor that you find but actively look for them, because they’re definitely out there. And use all these wonderful experiences, these things you enjoy, these connections, to find a job but beyond that, to do good work. In the language of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, to find your “Purposeful Work.”

To have fun, to make new friends, to take care of your family, your friends and others, and to do good work in the world. Of course, I believe the experiences that you’ve had at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ already ideally prepare you to do exactly this.

Congratulations again Class of 2015. I can’t wait to hear about what you are going to do next, and best wishes for a very exciting array of future endeavors! Thank you so much.

At the Boston office of TM Capital, where Brad Adams ’92 is a managing director, Ladd intern Zach Polich ’15 is learning what investment banking is really like.

Ladd intern Zach Polich ’15 and TM Capital managing director Brad Adams ’92 pose at TM headquarters in Boston, located on the 25th floor of Hancock Place. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Name: Zach Polich ’15

Hometown: Westborough, Mass.

Major: Economics

Internship Sponsor: The college’s Ladd Internship Program offers ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝-funded summer internships with for-profit and nonprofit businesses that often feature alumni networking opportunities.

1. Can you describe a typical day in your office?

I take the train from Westborough into Boston and arrive in the office around 8:30 a.m. Typically I work alongside the analysts, but I’ve also had the opportunity to work directly on projects for Brad Adams ’92.

Analysts’ work mainly involves performing in-depth industry research, creating both written and visual portions of pitch books for potential clients and refining confidential information memorandums or management presentations.

By the time I finish my evening runĚý— I do cross country at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝Ěý— and get home to Westborough it’s about 10:30.

2. How does the work you’re doing at TM Capital connect to your studies at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝?Ěý

I wouldn’t say the coursework I’ve done in my major and minor, economics and math, correlates directly with what I do on a daily basis at TM, but many of my courses emphasize the ability to creatively position information and think abstractly, which is what this industry is all about.

Polich says an internship helps you “find a work environment that fits your personality.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

3. What are you learning about the workplace?

Before this summer, I couldn’t explain my desire to get into investment banking beyond saying “I’ve read about it on Vault,” or “It sounds interesting and would fit my personality.” This opportunity gave me a tangible experience that I can speak to as to why I want to pursue a career in the field.

I’ve also learned the importance of workplace culture. Finding a work environment that fits your personality — rather than just chasing prestige — is an aspect of the job search that I might have overlooked had I not had this experience.

“I love it here.”

For me, the culture at TM Capital was a great fit. The environment had a collegial feel that enhanced efficiency, helping meet important project deadlines. I love it here.

Having the opportunity to work on projects alongside the analysts every day.

Working on various aspects of a deal cycle — from the initial solicitation to the closing management presentation — has not only given me a true sense of what I would work on as an analyst but also provided insight into tasks and responsibilities at all levels of management.

Cody Tracey ’15 of Baltimore received a 2013 Harward Summer Student Fellowship to work at the Boston-based Jane Doe Inc., a coalition of 60 local member programs working together with allies to find lasting solutions that promote the safety, liberty, and dignity for victims and survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

A Bonner Leader and the co-founder of a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ men’s group opposed to sexual violence, Tracey talks about his summer assignment and why men can be agents for change in this important work. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Davis Project for Peace recipients Spencer Collet ’13 and James LePage ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

Initiatives to foster Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through the Web and nurture collaborative conversations in a recently liberalized Myanmar have garnered Davis Projects for Peace awards for three ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students.

The $10,000 awards support international projects that college students undertake to “bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world,” in the words of philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis. .

Two seniors, Spencer Collet of Leawood, Kan., and James LePage of Cumberland, Maine, received the award for “Tweets for Peace,” their project using the Internet to enhance communication between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The pair will work with former participants in the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution program that takes place every summer in Otisfield, Maine.

2013 Davis Project for Peace recipient Aung Myint ’14. Photograph by Michael Bradley/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

Aung Myint, a junior from Yangon, Myanmar, received his award for “Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations,” a reading-discussion program to help build the capacity for critical judgment and constructive dialogue among ethnic minorities in his native country. Using Burmese translations of English texts from the Maryland-based , Myint will coordinate gatherings in Buddhist monasteries in Yangon.

Learn more about the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students’ Projects for Peace:

• Tweets for Peace
• Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations

Maine’s Morning Sentinel profiles record-holding sprinter Isaiah Spofford ’15 of Waterville, who’s ready to make the leap to one of the longer sprint distances this year.

Record-holding sprinter Isaiah Spofford ’15 will try the 400 meters this spring.
Photo by Tom Leonard ’78.

Spofford holds the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ record in the 60-meter dash, 7.09 seconds. While the 60-meter event is only a few years old, head coach Al Fereshetian points out that Spofford’s 55 time would be 10th-best in ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ history.

The point, Fereshetian , is that Spofford is fast and getting faster. “Our expectations are very high. He put in a fantastic fall of training.”

Spofford is runninf the 60- and 200-meter sprints this winter, then will add the 400 during the outdoor season. “Ever since I was a sophomore in high school, people have told me I’ll ease into the 400,” Spofford tells Lazarczyk. “This year I think it’s going to happen.”

Gathered students, staff and faculty fill the College Chapel pews during a memorial service for Evan Dube '15. Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

“We’re here to embrace Evan’s life and memory, and we’re also here to embrace each other as we try to move through this,” Associate Dean of Students James Reese told ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ folks gathered to remember a much-loved, now much-missed student.

“Share what you want to share and be who you want to be about this enormous matter, whenever you want,” Reese told the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ people who had been closest to Evan Dube ’15, who died May 19 during a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Short Term trip to Scotland.

Reese spoke during a noontime memorial gathering on May 24 for Dube. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝’ goodbye to Dube will be long, but this first remembrance revealed a path toward healing as people who knew him, or wished they had, shared glimpses of a spirit inspirational in its eager openness.

Professor of History Michael Jones, one of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty members who led the Shetland Islands trip, remembers Evan Dube '15.

Filling the College Chapel were hundreds of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty, staff and students, including friends who were by Dube’s side when he slipped from life on a beach on the island of Shetland Mainland.

Organized by the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the memorial wrapped readings, recollections and music in periods of silence that afforded a little time for reflection. “We see silence not as a place where nothing is happening,” explained Associate Multifaith Chaplain Emily Wright-Magoon, “but as a place where a lot is going on, where all of our inner voices are speaking within us, among us.”

Silence is “a really profound way of being together in community” — and more than welcome as a distressed campus sought to make sense of Dube’s passing.

Interim President Nancy Cable shared a message that Evan’s parents, John and Eileen Dube, have posted. “Many of you have asked us, ‘What can we do to help?” the Dubes wrote.

“And our family would like for each of you, for all of you, to do a random act of kindness for someone, anyone . . . a person you’ve just met or someone you don’t know at all. In that way you will honor the memory of who Evan truly was: a gentle soul, a kind heart who loved all, unconditionally.”

Indeed, Evan’s open-heartedness resonated through the Chapel as students, staff and faculty shared impressions and memories. “He wanted to be friends with everyone,” said his friend and classmate John Goodman, who quoted a Latin saying that Dube had posted on his Facebook site: “Alter ipse amicus,” translated as “a friend is another self.”

Olivia Norrmen-Smith '13 and Justin Lipton '12 perform "Blackbird" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney during the service.

One of Dube’s floormates from the 280 College Street residence noted Evan’s willingness to let arguments go and bygones be bygones. “He loved us as a family,” she said, “and we didn’t know each other before we got here.”

A few people, including one of the faculty members who led the Short Term visit to the Shetland Islands, noted Dube’s eager embrace of classical and medieval studies. During the trip, said history professor Michael Jones, he had asked Dube to help transcribe an old handwritten document, and gave him a website on paleography, the study of old handwriting, that might help with the task.

“He gave me, after that, his website on paleography,” Jones said, to appreciative laughter.

As we deal with the pain of losing someone close, part of the struggle is simply trying to find a place for such a loss, a way to understand it that enables us to keep going. Dube was a Buddhist, and one reading from a Buddhist philosopher offered some comfort from that perspective.

Those attending the service find comfort in each other and the opportunity to reflect.

Aung Myint ’14, who comes from Myanmar and leads Buddhist meditation sessions at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, read from Contemplation of No-Coming, No-Going by author and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, secret thresholds on our journey. Birth and death are a game of hide and seek. So love with me, hold my hand. Let us say goodbye, say goodbye to meet again soon. We meet today, we will meet again tomorrow, we will meet at the source of every moment.”

Another kind of comfort, harder but maybe more cathartic, came from Evan Dube himself. Wright-Magoon and Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace read from a few Twitter posts that he had made in November and December. In one, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ first-year quoted A.A. Milne, from Winnie-the-Pooh:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

On Sunday night, at least 200 ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College students, faculty and staff members crowded into Perry Atrium in the college’s Pettengill Hall for comfort and support, and to share thoughts and stories about Evan. He was remembered as a young man who was studious and serious, exuberant and funny — and a caring friend.

From Plaistow, N.H., Evan was pursuing classical studies at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝.ĚýHe amassed an impressive theatrical resume during his highĚýschool years and had already entertained the campus with his performance as the cowboy Virgil in the Department of Theater’s production of Bus Stop last fall.

Associate Dean of Student James Reese recounted that in September 2011, during orientation for the first-year class, Evan also impressed his classmates and others by winning an annual competition to become the first new student to recite the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ mission statement by heart. “He spoke every word correctly and in a way that gave every word meaning.” Reese also noted that when the time came to publicly recognize Evan for his win, he wasn’t present, because he had left early to do homework.

College Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace recounted Evan, a Buddhist, “bounding” into his office to introduce himself and to say, “I have some very unusual religious beliefs, and I thought that as chaplain you should know.”

The event concluded a difficult day for the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ community as the campus learned Sunday afternoon about Evan’s passing via an email message from Dean of Students Tedd Goundie.

“We will be absorbing this terrible loss for many days and long into the future,” Goundie wrote. “Please join me in keeping Evan’s family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.”

Evan’s fellow students in Scotland are receiving grief counseling and will return to Boston on Tuesday.

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Multifaith Chaplaincy and the college’s Health Center are providing counseling for members of the campus community.

Incident background

Evan was one of 10 ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students in a study-abroad class co-taught by Gerry Bigelow, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ lecturer in history, and Professor of History Michael Jones.

The students were participating in the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project, an ongoing archaeological research project funded by the National Science Foundation, involving scholars from ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and other higher education institutions.

Following a preliminary investigation, Scottish law enforcement authorities stated that “there do not appear to be any suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident.”

The authorities have given this :

Class members went to a beach south of the town of Lerwick, on the Shetland island called Mainland, to have a cookout. They arrived a little after 9 p.m. local time. Shortly afterward, Evan dived into the ocean briefly, then collapsed as he left the water.

Evan’s companions took immediate action, beginning resuscitation efforts and calling emergency medical services.

A local ambulance arrived on the scene within minutes, followed quickly by a helicopter that airlifted Evan to the nearest hospital, in Lerwick. Resuscitation efforts administered from the outset were unsuccessful.

The college has no other information about the incident to offer — simply that we have lost a member of our ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ community long before his time.

“I don’t think I could find a better balance anywhere else of everything: diversity, athletics, academics, fun, seriousness,” said Allaina Murphy ’15 of Poland Spring, who graduated from St. Dominic High School in Auburn.

Washuk explains that generous financial aid has made it possible for them to attend the college. Director of Admission Leigh Weisenburger tells Washuk that ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is making a point of tending to its relationships with area high schools, including “making sure guidance counselors know where we are, what ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is all about. Having those lines of communication open.”

Among the five local freshmen are two Somali students, the first members of the local immigrant community to matriculate at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. That’s a point of pride, Lewiston mayor Larry Gilbert tells the Sun Journal. Their matriculation is “a first, and a plus.”

A particularly egregious case was a student from Sri Lanka who originally expected to arrive on Monday, Aug. 29. The first travel alternative the airline offered wouldn’t have gotten him here till Sept. 6.

But Reese knew that airline schedules would be deranged during a tropical storm, and he urged the frustrated and anxious young man to keep trying for a better arrangement. The dean told him to get a good night’s sleep and then get back on the phone and try again. “The secret is just persistence,” says Reese, a frequent traveler himself to Sri Lanka, where he visits his in-laws.

The student did finally manage an itinerary that got him here around midnight Saturday — after a 56-hour journey that included an 18-hour layover in the other LA, Los Angeles. Reese picked him and another international traveler up at the Portland International Jetport, and expected to do the same for two more students, one from Pakistan and the other from Vietnam, in the wee small hours of Sunday. “Rebookings tend to be the last planes of the day,” he explained. “That’s where the empty seats are.”

The delays gave him a few short nights of sleep, but Reese didn’t seem to mind. “I love those moments when a student arrives,” he said.

“We get into the office about 1:30 in the morning and I tell them to call their parents. You can hear that energy on the other end of the line — that’s one of the most wonderful moments, the joy of hearing their child’s voice from a safe place.”

Students listen during the discussion of "Winning." Photograph by Rene Minnis.

A student speaks during the discussion of "Winning." Photograph by Rene Minnis.

A student listens to the panel discussion of the book "Winning" by Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina. The book was the common reading for the Class of 2015. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Incoming students discuss the book "Winning" by Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina in Alumni Gym. The book was the common reading for the Class of 2015. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Concertgoers enjoy the musical offerings. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

• Click on thumbnails, above, to view the slide show.

Images from ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Orientation for the Class of 2015 on Sept. 3, 2011.