A moment of joy in Killian Court

Diplomas in hand, a group of MIT’s newest alumni celebrated their achievement on the steps of Killian Court in May.

At the OneMIT Commencement ceremony, President Sally Kornbluth had this to say of the graduating students: “Taken together, in their critical mass, they are a natural wonder—as awe-inspiring as a visitation of 17-year-cicadas, as miraculous as a total eclipse of the sun. It has been our privilege to teach them, and to learn together with them.” In his keynote address at the ceremony, Noubar Afeyan, PhD ’87, chair and cofounder of Moderna, recalled that he’d been a big fan of the Mission: Impossible television show and movies when he was growing up. After briefly touching on Moderna’s rapid development of its covid-19 vaccine, he said that graduates of MIT are “uniquely prepared—and also obligated” to accept their own impossible missions: “At a time when the world is beset by crises, your mission is nothing less than to salvage what seems lost, reverse what seems inevitable, and save the planet. And just like the agents in the movies, you need to accept the mission—even if it seems impossible.”