Graduation season

I was invited to attend the college graduation ceremonies of two relatives this past week. I cry at weddings and graduations. These were both uplifting and moving in exactly the right way.

My nephew completed the undergraduate work for an engineering degree at Santa Clara University.

While taking the coursework, he was able to land a position in a research lab on campus doing interesting science on radio signal propagation and processing. It was hard-core engineering, designing antennas and building and programming the electronics to use them. He, his advisor and the rest of the research team did some really innovative work. They're submitting a paper to a referreed journal describing it.

I love research universities. Students learn facts and theory in the classroom, but nothing beats actually building things for developing skills and mastering a field. I was lucky to land a research position as an undergraduate at Berkeley decades ago. That time in the lab with peers and mentors – what I learned to do, who I got to know – was the most important part of my college education. I think the same was true for my nephew!

My brother and his family were in town for the ceremony, and of course it was wonderful to spend the day with all of them. The formal ceremony, though, was absolutely the highlight of the day for me. The faculty in their regalia, the speeches and invocations, the procession of students across the stage, names read aloud, acknowledging their accomplishments, is important. It lets them know that they've done a difficult and meaningful thing.

Santa Clara, by the way, is pretty woke. We listened to an acknowledgment of the indigenous people whose land we were on. One of the student speakers spoke at length about the importance of diversity and support for women, underrepresented students and LGBTQ community members. Being surrounded by new people and new ideas, learning respect for them, is a critical part of intellectual growth. The Jesuits are doing a good job!

A few days later, my cousin graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. She entered grad school immediately after completing her undergraduate work at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her field of research was also signals, but unlike my nephew, her work focused on communication and detection using sonar systems in the ocean. The Navy has an obvious interest in mixing sound and water.

Her work was impressive. The theses and the degrees described as students crossed the stage were generally amazing. We heard about innovative work in physics and mathematics, on deploying systems to space or the Earth's surface or underwater. There were interesting applications of machine learning to various fields. There are some top-tier brains in uniform!

The composition of her graduating class surprised me. I thought that NPS would educate members of the Navy. It does, of course. But there were Marines and members of the Coast Guard, Army and Air Force as well. There were even a few civilians who worked for one of the Armed Services branches or the Department of Defense. The graduating class was wonderfully diverse!

More surprising still was the number of graduates from other countries. Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan all sent members of their armed forces to NPS to earn advanced degrees. I had no idea before I sat in the auditorium and watched the ceremony.

On reflection, though, it makes serious sense. Sharing knowledge and collaborating on research with our allies is a good way to make sure all of us are fielding more effective and capable military forces. Equally – more? – important, the relationships that the students built across the branches of the military and across borders will no doubt be hugely valuable over time. During crises, folks who have known one another for years, who shared formative experiences and built bonds of trust early, can support efforts to resolve conflicts by speaking directly with one another.

We're at a peculiar moment in America. Research and science in general are denigrated, even demonized, by politicians. Progressive policies and ideas are under pressure, and even actively suppressed by some. The international order and global alliances are threatened as our country becomes isolationist and transactional.

All of that was front of mind as I watched members of my family cross their stages in celebration of their accomplishments. These two schools are preparing young people for the difficult work that faces us all in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. I was heartened by the academic excellence, the intellectual rigor, the openness and inclusiveness that I saw in both ceremonies.

Kind of made me misty.