 Congratulations, Class of 2021! Those of us who crawled, sprinted, or glided across the finish line, I'm not sure who glided, but I'm jealous. We did it. Many of us experienced two different graduate school lives. One where we sat wide-eyed, shoulder-to-shoulder in Annenberg, participating in hypothetical policy exercises. And another where we sat with terror in our eyes, in front of a screen, miles apart, as our exercises turned into reality. And we scrambled to analyze the life-or-death policy decisions happening in real time. Before we entered the real world, the real world came to us and brought with it painful reckonings. We faced a once-in-a-century health pandemic where weak U.S. policy sacrificed lives. We witnessed the weight of our leadership's discriminatory rhetoric as Asian Americans are attacked. We watched Americans finally realize that white supremacy continues to suppress black lives. We may not have been prepared for this, but crisis mode forced us to adapt and act. Uncertainty became our constant companion both in our school and personal lives. But because of the challenges we encountered, we've already learned to meet some of the world's biggest problems before ever leaving a classroom. When the COVID-19 campus response was insufficient and black lives were and continue to be at stake, we went on strike. When the nation pleaded for poll workers, we showed up. When elderly were at risk, we volunteered at vaccine clinics. Many of you did these things while combating your own personal struggles, whether it be facing mental illness in isolation or caring for sick loved ones. But when our peers were burnt out, we called them and carried them. We didn't prepare to meet these trials during graduate school. But how the Class of 2021 adapted and innovated over the past year has equipped us to meet the challenges of our day and more. And how we met those challenges has prepared us to enter a workforce that has always very much modeled the past academic year. Messy and uncertain. Soon we will enter spaces where the efficacy of our policy isn't determined by a letter grade, but by its lived impact. We have the policy tools. And if we endured and accomplished all of this in crisis, imagine our impact over the next years, decades with our newfound clarity and conviction. Any other year we'd ask ourselves, has school prepared us for the real world? But this year we ask, how will we prepare the world to heal? Go Blue.