Good news to share
In this Issue:
- 2024 Commencement and Baccalaureate Speakers
- Workday Student readiness sessions for students
- It’s time to get lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters
We’ve got good news to share today! First, if your Deacs are a little sleepy this morning, it might be because they were at our basketball game last night watching us completely dominate Pitt. It was a commanding win – Wake 91, Pitt 58 – and a fun game for Deac fans to watch. Our Deacs look good. I hope you got to watch the game too! And second, for our P’24s, we have news about Commencement – read on!
2024 Commencement and Baccalaureate Speakers
Today we announced that one of the nation’s top health leaders, Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Mandy K. Cohen, will deliver Wake Forest University’s commencement address on Monday, May 20. The ceremony will take place on Hearn Plaza and begins at 9 a.m.
Dr. Cohen led the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, where she focused on equity, data accountability and transparent communication as she helped lead the country during the COVID crisis. In 2023, she transformed the North Carolina Medicaid program through the state’s Medicaid expansion and her focus on “whole person health.”
In 2020, Dr. Cohen was awarded the Leadership in Public Health Practice Award from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health for her outstanding leadership during the COVID pandemic. In 2019, Modern Healthcare named her one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Healthcare.
The baccalaureate speaker will be Reverend Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. The Baccalaureate service will take place on Sunday morning, May 19, at 11 a.m.
The announcement was shared this afternoon on the Wake Forest News website. Please know how excited we are to have you join us on campus to celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2024 at Commencement.
The graduation ceremony and baccalaureate service are ticketed events reserved for graduates, their families and guests; ticket ordering information will be shared with students soon (students order their Commencement tickets). Livestream webcasts of both events will be available on the University’s commencement website, and recordings will be posted after the events.
Workday Student readiness sessions for students
Yesterday, students received this message about Workday Student, which is a new system students will use to register for classes, pay their bills, manage their personal contact information, more.
To help students get ready for the new system, they were invited to attend demonstrations of Workday Student to understand how the new system works and how they will use it for advising and registration for Fall 2024.
There are in-person and Zoom options, as outlined in the message. Please encourage your Deacs to explore the new system and get comfortable with it before they register for spring classes in April.
It’s time to get lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters
Many moons ago, an alumna friend of mine shared an article entitled “Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work.” It is an article that has stuck with me because it challenges us to drop whatever we think we ought to be doing, and instead getting “lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters.”
The author says that in thinking about life and work, we should pose the following questions:
Does it stand the test of time?
Does it stand the text of excellence?
Does it stand the test of you?
So much of modern life, it seems to me, feels like a checklist: get into college? Check. Get a job/grad degree? Check. Find a partner? Check. And I worry sometimes that in our desire to achieve what we think we should and check all those boxes, we don’t spend enough time thinking about what will ultimately make us happy.
Our students’ brains are still developing, and while they can surely recognize excellence when they see it, some/many of our students aren’t used to training that critical eye inward (since there is so much going on in their outside world) and reflecting on whether some goal or achivement really stands the test of them.
Parents and families, you may want to reflect a bit on how you can help your students begin to think about what truly matters to them. Not the achievements, but the big picture: Who am I? What matters to me? To what ends do I want to devote my life and work?
If your Deac is coming home for Spring Break in a couple of weeks, this may be a subject to consider broaching, or perhaps in the summer. Having clear thinking about what matters to your student, and what is worth getting “lethally serious” about, might help inform the choices they make about the rest of their time as Wake Forest students, and indeed about how they want to shape their lives.