Raised in a desert climate, he woke up to presence of leafy elms on Brown’s campus. He began soaking in the architecture around him, and most importantly, the people.

“I learned to be OK with lingering,” Faheem said. “Those minutes weren’t lost — they added up — because slowly, in those inefficient, unoptimized, unscheduled minutes, we built a life.”

He built connections across campus — classmates, faculty, friends, food service workers, security staff and others.

“The campus got smaller as my world got bigger,” Faheem said. “When I couldn’t go home to Egypt one year, Brown opened its doors: I received 27 invitations to stay at classmates’ homes… That’s what Brown is. That’s who we are — we just show up.”

All of those encounters, conversations and relationships opened Faheem’s world and his mind, and he urged his fellow graduates to embrace the unexpected and build community throughout their careers and lives beyond the Van Wickle Gates. Resist the temptation to speed up, he said.

“Get lost in your walks, let the world surprise you, walk toward the challenges, walk toward what scares you,” Faheem said. “Because at Brown, we learned to chart our own courses, [so] remember why you walk, remember who you walk for, and importantly, walk at your own pace… Those unscripted moments define what it means to live.”

Caelle Joseph: Building community and belonging

Born in Haiti, Joseph reflected on moving to the U.S. following a catastrophic earthquake in 2010 that displaced her family when she was 7. As she resettled in Boston, Massachusetts, she became aware for the first time of the concept of difference and belonging — and the importance of building community and fiercely protecting it.

“When the ground shifts beneath us — whether it be through a sudden loss, or uncertainty — we find out who we are, together,” Joseph said. “What steadies us is not certainty — it is community. Our community.”

The ground shifted again, she said, as her newfound community was impacted by economic pressures.

“I watched my favorite spaces, restaurants and longtime neighbors slowly disappear as rents rose and gentrification reshaped the places that made us us,” Joseph said. “That experience taught me something important: Belonging isn’t something you inherit, it’s something you protect, you fight for it, you build it brick-by-brick.”

Having journeyed through so much, she arrived at Brown and “I thought I knew everything — ask my family,” she quipped. But her college experiences humbled her and challenged her in new ways, large and small, from navigating Brown as a first-generation college student and mustering the courage to raise her hand in a seminar, to attending a student organization meeting where she didn’t know anyone and conversing late into the night with upperclassmen in Harambee House.

“We built belonging in dorm lounges where we shared food, secrets and our academic stress; we built belonging when we jumped and hugged each other after finally beating Harvard in football,” Joseph said to cheers from the crowd. “And building that kind of belonging required something deeper: it required courage.” 

Through courage, resilience and community support, she saw peers switch concentrations junior year to align with who they truly were, she saw classmates ask for help, and she saw “immigrants, low-income students, students of color… showing up in unfamiliar spaces foreign to them.”

“None of us made it through Brown alone — no matter how put together we look right now in our caps and gowns,” said Joseph, a concentrator in international and public affairs and business economics. “That is what I have learned here: when the ground moves, belonging is not something we inherit, it’s something we build.”

Joseph urged Class of 2026 graduates to use the courage and perseverance they cultivated at Brown to continue to build community in the world.

“Through the friends we cherish, the mentors who guided us and the communities that held us, I learned this: Belonging isn’t a room we walk into,” Joseph said. “Belonging is a room we help build, and courage is what helps us pick up the tools. I know this because we did not build any of these rooms alone.”