convocation

A Letter to Our Graduates, the Class of 2024

In a note to new graduates, Dean Sandro Galea encourages the Class of 2024 to always remember the core values and purpose of public health.

Dear graduates, the Class of 2024:

This weekend, our community will come together to celebrate all you have done, and to look ahead, with excitement, to all you will do next. On Saturday, you will enter the Track and Tennis Center as students, accomplished and ready for the future, and leave as alumni. When you leave, you will take with you your hard-earned degrees and our warmest wishes for your continued success.

As we look ahead to Convocation, I hope you will indulge me in sharing two thoughts that may be helpful on your journey. I will not call them “parting thoughts” because you will always be members of our community, as much a part of this school in your new role as alumni as you have been as students. Rather, I mean these thoughts as a simple reminder of why we do what we do.

First, I hope you will always remember the fundamental aspiration of public health: to create a healthier world for everyone, with no one left out. This means engaging with the foundational drivers of health—structural forces like racism, gender equity, housing, wages, and social and economic justice. Such forces are an ineluctable part of public health. We address them through research, teaching, activism, and our engagement with the public conversation about health. This engagement reflects our view that a healthier world does not just mean better healthcare. It means creating a world where health can flourish by building a future that is more compassionate, more just, and more inclusive. Building such a world is your task as public health professionals, your responsibility and privilege. As one who has been engaged in this work for 25 years, I can say—and I know I speak for many—that it is truly worth it. Few feelings are better than the feeling of working with likeminded members of a community towards the goal of creating a healthier future for all.

Second, as you work towards this future, I hope you will remember what health is fundamentally for. Health is, at core, a means to an end. That end is the living of a rich, full, dignified life. We aspire to build a healthier world so that everyone can live such a life. As I have often said, we do not live so we can be healthy, we wish to be healthy so we can live. Better health means more time to do what we want to do. It means more moments with family and friends, more chances to pursue our goals, more of everything that makes life meaningful. Everyone should be able to enjoy the good health that enables such a life, with no one excluded from the resources that support health. This means that the pursuit of health should never come at the expense of what health is for. I have long appreciated, as a definition of what our work should center, what Teju Cole called “the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings.” The pursuit of health should always be animated by this central, deeply human focus.

Thank you for being with us the past few years, for your commitment to the mission of public health, for all you shall do—informed by what you have learned at the school—in the coming decades. I am so very happy for all of you.

A final technical note. I have long seen Convocation as the happiest day of the year, a day of joy with family and friends, as we celebrate our graduates. Being with our community at graduation time is one of the great privileges of being dean of this school. However, in addition to being a dean, I am also a dad. This week, my son, Oliver, will be graduating from college in Pennsylvania. I will be with him on Saturday, celebrating his achievement, just as so many parents and loved ones will travel to be with you, our students, that day. I ask, then, for your understanding as I spend the day with my son, feeling the same joy in his achievement that your family and friends feel in yours. I am grateful to Yvette Cozier, associate dean for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, for agreeing to stand in for me at Convocation. Though I will not be with you in person, I will be with you in spirit, sending you my very best wishes for the day.

We look forward, with excitement, to all you will do in your next chapter.

With admiration and warmth,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
Boston University School of Public Health