Convocation

onvocation speaker Jodi Schwarz, Professor of Biology and Founding Director of Vassar’s Grand Challenges program, alluded to her own serpentine academic journey. “I hated science in high school,” she said, noting that she had gone out of her way at her own alma mater, Oberlin College, to avoid science classes.

Then something unexpected happened. While perusing possible study-abroad programs, she came across a photograph of a sailboat and was intrigued by the idea of sailing as a study-abroad experience. “That seemed romantic,” Schwarz said. “It seemed exciting. It definitely seemed different.” The program was called SEA Semester and Schwarz said it turned out to be “much more than a romantic journey on the high seas. It was an oceanographic research program doing hardcore ocean science.”

That voyage eventually led Schwarz to pursue research into the magical symbiosis between algae and coral, a key biochemical interaction that helps to sustain life on the planet. “Corals live in the tropical oceans, which are essentially food deserts. There are not enough basic nutrients in tropical waters for algae, the plants of the sea, to grow,” she said. Yet, “improbably, at some point in the evolutionary past, some algae that needed nutrients and coral that needed food must have made contact and realized in a biological sense that what one needed, the other could provide, and that if they integrated their different ways of being into a new, symbiotic relationship, they could turn this food desert into habitable space.”

Schwarz urged students to “Be a coral!

“If there is anything that we know about a liberal arts education it is that it pushes us all to be collaborative, to pull our perspectives and skills together to tackle challenges,” she said. “The most profound moments of our lives can happen when we place ourselves into a state of dislocation and see things in new ways, learning to recognize what others have to offer and discovering new parts of ourselves.”

Read a transcript of Professor Schwarz’s Convocation Address.

During Convocation, the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC) bestowed its Young Alum Achievement Award upon Elise Shea ’19. Founder of Conversations Unbound, a student-run organization that employs displaced persons from countries throughout the world to provide paid tutoring services to current students at Vassar and other educational institutions. The annual award is given to a Vassar alum of the last decade.

Shea earned her master’s degree in public policy at Oxford University and currently lives in London, where she works as Managing Director at the Global Development Incubator. Gamarra noted that Shea had founded Conversations Unbound as the Syrian civil war was intensifying, “and the media portrayed displaced people as either a burden or a threat. Elise chose to challenge these assumptions by recognizing their invaluable experiences and skills.”

Shea credited her Vassar education with providing the spark for her idea. Classes like Politics of Humanism, she said, “changed my life and had a direct influence on my work founding Conversations Unbound.” And Professor of History Himadeep Muppidi’s Subaltern Studies class, she acknowledged, “helped me to identify and be attentive to the voices that are never heard, and I thought about this class all the time during my work collecting displaced persons’ opinions of humanitarian aid. And I only got the job [at the Global Development Incubator] because I took Candice Lowe Swift’s anthropology class on research methods and because I had some quantitative experience from my econ classes.” Vassar, she noted, has remained a rudder guiding her path. —Larry Hertz