2026 Student Addresses

Investiture 2026 student address by MEng candidate Naisha Sinha:

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. First off, I would like to thank the Thayer faculty, Dean Van Citters, Provost Schnell, members of the Thayer Board of Advisors, and the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. I am truly honored to be here celebrating this milestone with all of you; and celebrating my first time stepping foot on this campus.

I'm just kidding, it's actually my second time.

So, as Dean Van Citters mentioned, I completed my entire master's degree—every lecture, lab, and frantic deadline—from my home in California, thousands of miles away. And yet, here I am, somehow standing in front of all of you. Which either means Dartmouth has a very generous definition of the term "student," or that belonging to the Dartmouth community has never really been about geography.

When I enrolled in the inaugural online cohort, I was also working full-time as a hardware verification and support engineer. My classroom became my laptop screen, my campus a time zone. And my classmates? Well, they were a group of people I never physically met, scattered all across the world, probably very caffeinated, and all somehow convinced this was a good idea.

And we were right, though I'll admit I had my doubts. Online programs carry a certain reputation: you join, watch some videos, and you move on.

What happened instead was that our faculty mailed us hardware kits. FPGAs, Arduinos, and all the wires and resistors one could dream of. They set up robots on the Dartmouth campus and let us program them remotely. Meaning that, while I was sitting at home during Professor Kokko's course, I was simultaneously navigating a maze-solving robot from thousands of miles away, troubleshooting with both classmates online and with faculty and students on campus.

The difference was intention: this program was designed so that distance could never be an issue. Dartmouth chose to see the word "online" as a design constraint to be solved. And that changed my definition of engineering.

We talk about engineering as problem-solving, which it absolutely is. But the problems that matter most are never solved alone. They're solved by people like Professor Santos, who stayed in it with us as we built a financial query summarization system from scratch in Natural Language Processing. Like Professor Odame, whose Smart Sensors design course had us building an ECG cardiac analysis system with teammates that we'd never met in person. Like Professor Farnham, who would find time to hop on a Zoom call when I was stuck on an FPGA timing problem at 9pm. Different distances, but same instinct.

Engineering is not just the solution, it's the community that makes it possible. At Dartmouth, the university where the term "AI" was first coined, I experienced something truly human: genuine connection, all while learning about AI.

I came into this program thinking I was going to learn about circuits and technical frameworks. And I did. But I also learned that connection is something you build—creatively and across whatever constraints exist—and that engineers who understand that will always build something more durable than those who don't.

So to my cohort: we had no idea what we were getting into, but it worked out in our favor, and I couldn't have asked for a better group to figure it out with.

To the faculty, staff, and program directors: thank you for refusing to let "online" mean distant. You built a community out of late-night Zoom calls and packaging tape, and for that we'll be forever grateful.

And to every graduate on the Green today—whether you're earning your Bachelor's of Engineering, your Master's, or your PhD: wherever you go from here, carry that community with you. Because Dartmouth's community is unlike any other.

Thank you.

Investiture 2026 student address by BE candidate Piper Gilbert '25: 

Transcript

Thank you, DVC. I'm honored to be here today amongst fellow graduates, family, and our esteemed faculty and staff today.

I gave around 100 tours of Dartmouth during undergrad. Walking across the Green, I got asked a lot of questions. Most of them were about the food. Many were about the community at Thayer. To that, I answered: Thayer is collaborative. Warm. People here help each other.

But no applicant ever dared ask the question: Tour Guide, why did you stick with engineering when you felt like you were bad at it? Because at first, I was.

I had come to Dartmouth to study astronomy and history: to look up and out, to trace how we got here and what's still out there. Engineering is, in many ways, the opposite instinct: scrutinizing parts on a workbench and asking how to build it. I picked it partly because I wanted to be challenged, and partly, honestly, because Thayer's people pulled me in before I fully understood what I was signing up for.

My first term in engineering, I struggled through ENGS 20. One night in a Great Hall booth, demoralized by a puzzle I couldn't crack, I was about one line away from giving up on engineering entirely. Two classmates I didn't know yet sat down, compared wrong answers, laughed, and stayed with me. By dawn, none of us had mastered the assignment, but we had learned Thayer's rule: admit you're lost, and be each other's tour guide. 

The Great Hall booths, I'm convinced, are not study spaces. They're a kind of confessional. They're where Thayer students admit, quietly—and sometimes very loudly in the case of me and my friends—that they don't understand the problem. Over many years of "I don't get it" and "hey, me neither" and "wait, say that again," the geometry of who owns a problem set flattens out into something that looks a lot like a community. 

The thing this school is secretly best at is making it safe to be lost in front of others. When I was eighteen, I thought that engineering was a discipline of mastery, that somewhere in my classes I would unlock the magic and start whipping up incredible things in SolidWorks or writing flawless unit tests in MATLAB. It isn't; or at least that never happened for me. Good engineers are humble—and imperfect. They've gotten comfortable being wrong in front of each other, out loud, frequently, constantly.

The booths are not places you visit once; they are places you keep coming back to, on different sides of the table. The person who needs help and the person who gives it are the same person on different Tuesdays. Every term, a new cast of characters: a different partner on a different project, a different professor I hadn't met yet, a different friend of a friend staring at the same problem set I had stared at two years earlier. The booths never changed. But, I did.

Freshman year, I couldn't have told you how a power grid worked. A week ago, with some of my best friends, I pitched one to NASA for the moon base. Somewhere between those two sentences is a booth—or two, or five—and a whole lot of people who sat down and joined me. 

So, why did I stay in something I struggled with? Not because of grit. Not because I had some clear vision of who I'd become. I stayed because a booth was open, and people sat down with me, and not one of them ever made me feel like the struggling version of myself was the permanent one. 

Soon enough, the booths will fill again with students we'll never meet. We will go forth into our lives and careers. Whatever comes, remember to sit down across from a stranger who is stuck. Be the applicant and the tour guide in equal measure. Design the project—and the community. This is what we leave behind: not what we built here, but how we sat with each other while we were building it.

So, I'm saying this now, on behalf of everyone: thank you for sitting down.