617 Students Graduate From Caltech

On June 16, Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum charged 617 graduates at the 129th Commencement ceremony to embrace both challenges and opportunities of the future while upholding the experiences that shaped them at Caltech.

By Julia Ehlert

The Friday morning ceremony marked a momentous occasion for Caltech’s newest graduates. Among an audience of family members, friends, faculty, and trustees, the Institute awarded 233 bachelor’s degrees, 155 master’s degrees, and 228 doctoral degrees.

After the class of 2023 processed into the ceremony, David Thompson (MS ’78), chair of the Caltech Board of Trustees, shared opening remarks and reflected on the Institute’s accomplishments over the past year.

He then introduced Commencement speaker Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, director of Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and author of several books.

In her Commencement speech, Professor Allen called on Caltech graduates to uphold democracy and human dignity in an age of technological development and artificial intelligence.

She spoke to her experiences growing up in the “age of the great pulling apart,” highlighting the nation’s political polarization and her career efforts to foster an effective government in the service of its people.

Professor Allen described technological advances that transformed the nature of power, economics, and democracy in America. “We’ve already seen how social media has knocked the pillars of our representative government out from under us,” noting engineers will have a vital role to play in the future.

Professor Allen issued graduates a call to service to ensure the safe deployment of AI technology with robust regulation, evaluation of risks and ethics, and the prioritization of humanity.

After Professor Allen’s speech, Caltech’s undergraduate houses represented their members with lively traditions during the conferral of degrees.

Each time the name of a graduate from Fleming House was called, Fleming’s president rang a bell; Venerable House graduates were acknowledged with a whistle, and Lloyd House members with the ringing of the Lloyd gong. Other houses wore Commencement stoles in their house colors, and the boom of the Fleming cannon marked the end of the event.

Four awards

Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees were conferred to joyful cheers from the crowd, after which Rosenbaum announced the recipients of four awards.

• First, Aditi Seetharaman received the Mabel Beckman Prize, honoring a female student for academic excellence, leadership, and service to the Institute community.
• Abigail Jiang and Jolly Patro received the Frederic W. Hinrichs, Jr., Memorial Award, which recognizes the seniors who, in the opinion of the undergraduate deans, made the greatest contribution to the student body.
• Jin Ming Koh received the George W. Housner Prize for Academic Excellence and Original Research, which recognizes a senior who has demonstrated excellence in scholarship and in the preparation of an outstanding piece of original research.
• Finally, Carmen Amo Alonso received the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize, which honors a student whose PhD thesis reflects extraordinary standards of quality, innovative research, and the potential for opening new avenues of human thought and endeavor.

The president concluded the ceremony with a message of congratulations and inspiration to graduates.

Read the full article on Caltech.edu