Graduation Issue 2023

Dear Class of 2023,

The College will remember you for what you studied, when you graduated, and where you went next, but we will remember you as our mentors, classmates, and friends. You led us in RSOs and teams, you brought us to your favorite spots on and off campus, and most importantly, you showed us how to be students at the University of Chicago. And you did all of this amid and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic—a unique challenge that made the beginning of our three years together tough and the ending of it even tougher.

This year, as we bid farewell to more than 1,700 brilliant mentors, classmates, and friends and congratulate each of you on achieving a remarkable personal milestone, we also close a defining chapter of campus history. The Class of 2023 is the last class to have experienced the College before COVID-19; the last class to have a significant share of its members born in the 20th century; and the last class to have experienced the 10-week quarter, four full years under Dean John Boyer, a one-year residency requirement, and countless more elements of what will soon be called the old UChicago.

While navigating these watershed moments in campus history, you also had to grapple with major global history. Just as you began to settle into college life, the pandemic struck, and you were expected to face the unexpected. As that crisis unfolded, the country was confronted with a broad reckoning with racism—one that deeply touched the South Side, a place that many of you eventually grew to call home. Born of these circumstances, you revitalized dormant RSOs, created new ones, drove students to vote at the polls and on Poll Party, and shared your wisdom with us as campus reopened one building at a time.

To graduating members of The Maroon, thank you for being our editors, photographers, designers, and confidants, and thank you for excelling at each one of these tasks. And to everyone else beyond The Maroon with whom we crossed paths—peer mentors, lab partners, hometown friends, new neighbors, roommates, baristas, TAs, acquaintances we got to know at parties, strangers in the library we never got to know—thank you for animating our UChicago experiences in the way that you each did. We know you’ll do the same wherever you go next.

Solana Adedokun and Nikhil Jaiswal, editors-in-chief
Michael McClure, managing editor

Read the full 2023 Graduation Issue here.