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Yesterday, graduates of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering celebrated the completion of their degrees via a live virtual ceremony. The event featured faculty and student speakers and the acknowledgement of student award winners and graduates. You can watch the

The event represented the end of a challenging and unprecendented year at the department and ��ƷSM����ӰƬ. The students should be commended for their perseverance under incredibly difficult and challenging circumstances since the start of the pandemic.

From the faculty and staff of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, congratulations to the graduates and their friends and families!

Speech Transcript from JEDI Award Winner Nadir Shakir

Hello my Fellow Graduates,

I honestly did not know what to talk about. So, why not talk about books, or literature. A simple word, a simple creation. The definition of to write means “to form to create, with an instrument on a surface.” To create.

Now why am I talking about books. Well, it is because books encouraged me to learn and urged me to create.

I used to not like to read at all, but then my boy Avery Allen gave me a Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan and it changed my life forever. I started to go to the library and pickup any Kurt Vonnegut book available. Come to find out he was a chemical engineer at first and then became an author.

From there I slowly started to just walk around the library and see what other books they had and I was amazed by what was there.

Eventually, I started to read books on the mind, relationships, history (my favorite), philosophy (also a favorite), religion, science, etc. The books I read give me energy. Like I am floating in the air. When I read a new way of thought, of consciousness I feel like I have entered a new realm, as if I am wiping the dirt of my glasses.

Realizing it now, I subconsciously searched for truth and not for comfort or for ego. The books I read help me to see how much my ego, our egos blind us like the dirt on glasses. Most of us here, including me look for comfort.

C.S. Lewis said, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

I found comfort in the richness, the harshness, the duty, the freedom, the restraints of the world.

I have come to accept my faults, my wrongdoings, my future wrongdoings and will continue to try and correct them. I will not be a victim to myself, or the world and I have learned this through reading.

I have been blessed to be given books, finding books that break down my ego that have put me on this path of becoming a competent individual, not for the sake of being an individual but for the sake of the collective.

I have found to many times, people reading books only to build up the ego, it's not bad but when is it too much? When is it irrational? For we are human beings, and we can never be right about everything under the stars. What identities do you hold and is the truth in every one of them?

Like is everything you know about your identity truth or is it comfort, the dirt on your glasses? You can’t have the truth support every identity you hold?

Because were humans, we can choose to do wrong to do right, to lie. Books do the same thing, even when we look at research, we can interpret the data into a lie or to further the truth.

If I sound like I am beating around the bush, well let me cut to the chase.

We are all going to graduate and move on into another chapter of our lives. We can choose to stay as we are and believe we know is all there is to know and that it the best of the best or we can know that we know nothing and that is when the fun begins. We get to re-learn and learn new things.

So, I say to you this do not learn to inflate or to annihilate the ego.

Learn to understand, whether or not you like it, understand because you will find that the truth lies in the gray, the middle, the plan of existence where you must give before you get, while still never expecting to receive or be owed anything.

I wish the best for us as we graduate. Thank you.