President Sian Leah Beilock, Remarks as Delivered

Hello, and welcome back, Classes of 2020 and 2021! Congratulations.

It’s so wonderful to be together — really together — and to be able to congratulate you in person on your graduation. Only this time, we get to celebrate not only your achievements during your four years at Barnard but also the many things that you have accomplished since finishing your studies. You’ve taken momentous steps, like enrolling in graduate school, starting your first full-time job — sometimes from your living room — negotiating your salary, moving to a new city, publishing your thesis or your research, moving into a new apartment, and so much more. It’s all really a cause for celebration.

For some of us, this time has felt like an eternity, and for others, it has felt brief and fleeting. I’m sure your post-Barnard lives have brought you a mix of challenges and also satisfaction, both personally and professionally. But today, we are here to celebrate your success, because no matter how this time has felt or what obstacles you’ve encountered along the way, you have certainly accomplished a great deal.

You ventured out into the world just after emerging from an unexpectedly difficult college experience. The Classes of 2020 and 2021, in particular, bore the brunt of the unexpected — and frankly, scary — onset of this global emergency, and the dislocation and disruption it caused, interfering with what you all had come to expect: an undergraduate experience full of intellectual immersion, camaraderie, social experimentation, and cultural abundance — all happening in the best campus in the world, New York City. 

But you never allowed yourselves to succumb to disappointment or frustration — at least not for too long. You didn’t just stay on course; you seized the opportunity to adapt and grow in new ways. And the whole Barnard community is stronger for it.

I’m not talking about “making lemons into lemonade” here. What I’m talking about is your ability to adapt to change based on drastically different circumstances and to create entirely new possibilities for growth and success that go beyond just making the most of a bad situation. What you demonstrated so profoundly is that Barnard students, individually and collectively, have what psychologist — and Barnard alum — Carol Dweck, Class of ’67, famously classifies as a growth mindset: the belief that your abilities and personal qualities are not fixed traits but rather can be stretched and cultivated through work, practice, and persistence. 

A growth mindset can make the difference between responding to setbacks by quickly admitting defeat or harnessing your ingenuity and strengths to overcome them in ways that, in turn, broaden your skill set, your imagination, and your fitness for confronting whatever comes next.

Let’s look at how you did that.

In the spring of 2020, every one of you had to vacate campus quite suddenly. You had to adapt to new modes of study, class participation, and social and extracurricular involvement as quickly as you had to adapt to a return home or to other surroundings in the middle of a terrible pandemic. And you didn’t just make it work. You made it a priority to care for yourselves, but also care for others, your classmates, and your communities. You asked, “How can we seize this opportunity to better ourselves and what is around us? How can we practice our commitment to improving our world in a moment of tragedy?”

You did this by helping to create a Safety Net Fund, an emergency relief fund used to help students deal with unexpected financial burdens. You did this by working with us to help become one of the very few colleges or universities to change our curriculum in response to COVID-19. You took new courses that delved into racism and global politics, asylum at the Mexican border, and how actually you could test for COVID-19 in wastewater that some of us were producing. And once we could invite you back to campus, your growth mindset kicked in again. You worked with us yet again to develop new methods to be together, whether through your senior year or in the Class of 2020 today. 

And then of course, you had to adapt to the disappointment of changing and changing circumstances again: graduation ceremonies that were put on pause or gone virtual. But you didn’t just adapt, you did what Barnard students do, you pushed us to think more holistically about what we could accomplish — graduates and administrators working together. A new kind of celebration, a new way of being, emerged.

And here we are today: the Barnard Classes of 2020 and 2021, family and friends, for a day of well-deserved celebration of your determination, how nimbly you adapted to wildly changing circumstances, of how eagerly and creatively you continued to learn, and of how passionately you stuck to your convictions and supported and comforted one another along the way. You had a growth mindset that turned misfortune into enterprising innovation and action that has transformed our community — and we are all better for it. 

But that need to adapt doesn’t go away. And I’m sure you’ve learned in numerous ways, in the year or two since you graduated, how you will constantly have to adapt to changing circumstances and make hard choices, choices that are not easy. But your willingness to adjust and choose — which goes part and parcel with taking risks, failing, and emerging stronger from failure, being uncomfortable in many different situations — is what I hope your atypical Barnard experience has fortified in you so that the journeys forward, wherever they take you, are always a source of betterment, for you and for the world.

And let me just remind you that having a growth mindset is not about just getting up once you’ve failed or dealing with negative circumstances. I think the most important thing to think about with the growth mindset is what you do after you succeed. People usually don’t talk about this; they mostly talk about the growth mindset and failure, but once you’ve triumphed, a growth mindset is what motivates you to tackle even more. This is because you know that your success didn’t simply come from being good at something or being endowed with a particular ability or skill; it instead comes from hard work and the effort you put into it and trying when you didn’t get something right.

This sort of mindset also suggests that we need to really look at the power of leaning on one another. Remember that it’s okay to ask for help, that it’s okay to help those around you. Remember that Barnard is here for you, through Beyond Barnard, for the rest of your lives — if you seek professional advice, you want to talk to an alum, you change careers, you’ve gone in and out of the workforce, Barnard is here for you, for now and forever.

And I hope that you continue to be for our next generation of students, that you pass along what you’ve learned, your assurance that everyone’s path is not linear — your relationships, interests, careers, and lives will not follow a neat path, and I hope you talk to those coming up through Barnard that this is what it’s all about. And when students may be worried or wondering how they can go on when their first path hadn’t gone the way they planned, we look forward to saying, “Just ask the Classes of ’20 and ’21, we’ve learned so much from them, how they’ve continue to grow, to persevere, their compassion for each other and also how they’re practicing compassion for themselves.”

We’re so proud of you. We know that whatever comes next is going to push you in new and interesting ways, and we cannot wait to see how you go out and change the world.
You are clearly such special members of our alums. Thank you so much for the extraordinary legacy you’ve already left and for what you’ll do in the future. Congratulations.