Orientation 2025: Welcome for First-Year Students

What a moment. For the Class of 2029, and our transfer students, and for all of us.

Jeannie and our dedicated leadership group for family engagement. Anderson and all of our amazing events and facilities crews. Anibal for his great videography.

Let’s thank each of the people who made today happen.

Jenn and our insightful admissions team.

Kylee and our outstanding scholar-leader student body.

Ellen and our phenomenal academic deans and brilliant faculty.

Dahlia and the inspired commitments of our parents and parent network board to help build this next great generation.

Jimmy and our incredibly selfless, dynamic, and dedicated student life group.

All of our spirited, student leaders, our FYGs and RAs, who have been training hard for your arrival. Even our football team and other athletes who lifted luggage as part of their summer training!

(Let’s hear it for our students!)

And especially each of you who came in support of our entering students:

Our phenomenal parents, grandparents, siblings, families, and friends who love and believe in us and who have made heroic sacrifices to create this opportunity for our incoming students.

Our avid alumni and dedicated board of trustees and thousands of generous donors to help us prove the possible.

I feel such gratitude to each and every one of you.

I am so thankful this morning for everyone in my life who helped drive this moment for me.

My teachers and mentors and family, including Priya and the most famous being on the campus, our labradoodle, Theo.

For everyone in your lives who drove you (figuratively and literally) to this spot.

I know you are here this morning to listen to and learn from us.

Yet, we are here to bring you together to listen to and learn from you.

I’d like you all to stand up, look around to your right or left and find someone you don’t know, and take in the room.

That’s how we begin today: gratitude, social warmth, personal connection, shared purpose.

President Chodosh addressing the first-year and transfer students during Orientation 2029.

one, a crumpled envelope

Today, for me, at the beginning of my thirteenth and final year as president of CMC, I thought of my Nana, my maternal grandmother.

When I was too little and her knees too stiff for the chosen family activity, I learned, often over a card game of canasta or gin rummy, about her childhood in the Ukraine.

How she fled the political violence of the pogroms in the bottom of a ship to arrive in Ellis Island, at 8 years old in 1904.

Growing up, I didn’t have religious training. My Nana filled that gap.

In our Jewish tradition, the responsibility of adulthood starts at 13 with a bar mitzvah.

This is the moment for us to assume responsibility as an adult.

Nana invited my mom and me over to celebrate in an intimate way, over some Entenmann’s coffee cake and Lipton tea.

She told me what I meant to her, as I was named after her husband, my grandfather.

She gave me an old envelope with crumpled $5- and $10-dollar bills that she had saved for me under her pillow from the day I was born.

My Nana taught me how lucky I was.

I thought of my Nana this morning because at the end of this year, I’ll be 13 again, at least in presidential age.

A moment to express appreciation to everyone who made this all happen, and to take responsibility for a new chapter.

For all of you, this is a similar rite of passage, a significant step, one in which to give full credit to those who helped get you here and a moment to take responsibility for your own lives.

I tell you this story here and now, also because, like my Nana, your families have placed their savings, their commitment, their sacrifices, their stories, their trust, their love, in a special envelope that stores all their dreams and hopes for you.

Since the day you were born, safely under their own pillows each night, just so that you might have the opportunity to be someplace like this, all here together with us.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for us, as parents (and grandparents, and younger siblings) is letting go.

It can be sad and moving, as this is an opportunity for our students to step up into this new phase of independence and self-fulfillment.

It is poignant for me too as I stand here in this moment for the last time, choosing to let go when the College is at its best, powerful and ascending, and precisely when I feel my strongest self.

The greatest pride for us is watching you get going.

Challenging yourselves, building friendships for a lifetime, finding your own purpose and walking in shared step with us.

So be sure to hug your families today. Make sure they are doing okay,

When you get back from WOA!, call and text them frequently.

(Here’s a secret tip. When our son went to college, he learned to put an exclamation point at the end of his short texts, just to make us feel better that he was doing OKAY! I saw through the tactic, but it worked anyways.)

So, steal it. I did. I now use it with him when he is worried about me.

two, disorientation

For the Class of 2029, for all of us, this is a consequential time.

One full of protracted challenges and unrealized opportunities.

Globally, horrific, protracted wars in the Middle East, the Ukraine, Sudan, and many other places. 123 million people forcibly displaced.

A planet heating up, at times literally on fire.

A polarized and insecure polity.

A constitutional moment with an executive branch stepping across historical thresholds of self-restraint.

A loneliness pandemic.

Worry about the advent of AI and its impact on human intelligence and wellbeing.

And yet, can we see the seeds of peace in war?

Can we see the silver threads in our clouds?

The phenomenal break-throughs in science and computation, green technology, personalized medicine. Social, policy, business, and educational innovations that hold the promise of larger scale solutions. Communities that persist in their resilience and humanity.

Our underlying sense and practice of common good that is hardly ever newsworthy. Our enduring care for one another, our shared purpose, and my unwavering belief that our students can help lead as the next great generation?

I know you’re feeling many conflicting emotions today:

Nervous and excited. Self-questioning and driven. Longing for home and excited for new adventures, all at the same time.

We also know full well how disorienting orientation can be.

The challenges of just getting to this point. 

How to navigate the archipelago of LA and the shark infested waters we call traffic?

What will fit in the room? The return trips to Target? Where to get something to eat?

The endless words of advice we can’t remember.

Meeting your roommate’s family: what was her mom’s name again?

This is all so confusing.

All after the incredibly hard work to get to this point:

The long nights of study, the tough practices and competitions, the community service and part-time jobs, the number 2 pencils and bubbles on the multiple-choice tests, the endless drafts of college essays, the financial challenges, the annoying questions: where are you applying to college? The wait and wait lists, the big decision.

After all of that, let’s pause, set our feet firmly into the ground, before we step forward, to reflect on what we endeavor to achieve here together.

three, Izzy’s question

When Izzy Ravi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944, he attributed his success to his parents.

When Izzy got home from school each day, they didn’t ask him about his grades or even what he learned.

They asked: Izzy, did you ask a good question today?

In honor of Izzy’s parents, let’s pose a question in our moment, about our shared purpose, our place for pursuing it, and the community we build to pursue it together.

Why are we here?

This is really three questions.

Why are we here?
Why are we here?
Why are we here?

(the why)

Why are we here?
What is our calling?
What does the world need from us?
What role can we play?

To face and address the major forces, the complex, wicked problems and seize the exciting opportunities we face in the world:

How to lead responsibly in business, government, and the professions?

How to: build businesses, lift living standards, reduce poverty, seize the value, and reduce the risks, of technology and globalization, cool the planet, prevent and cure disease, earn and restore trust in our civic and public institutions, overcome division, pernicious discrimination, and repression, prevent violence in our streets, schools, and grocery stores, reverse escalatory cycles of war in our world.

How to make a difference: through effective civic, community, local, national, global engagement, by pulling people together in a world that often seems to want tear us apart, by leading, not through the persuasion of power, but through the power of persuasion.

In setting these external goals, let’s be clear.

In order to face, understand, improve these conditions, to succeed and thrive in our own lives all depends on one human capability: Our ability to learn and put that learning to work.

We cannot solve, we cannot contribute to, we cannot lead what we don’t understand.

Yet we can solve each and every one of our challenges, seize every single opportunity, big and small.

If only we figure out what we have to learn, how to learn it, and how to apply what we’ve learned to the problem we’ve framed.

This means stepping up to that responsibility. We learn when we own it.

This means realizing that our curiosity is our most critical virtue in education. Like Izzy, we learn through questions.

This means building our own community of mutual support and heightened expectations for what we want to learn. We learn through others.

And finally, this means trying new things that we don’t already know how to do. We learn through experience.

So today and every day after this, we: step up and face the challenges, unleash the power and creativity of our curious minds, learn through our differences, through love for one another, through friendship, through the games we play, through the projects we take on.

We inspire and inculcate the dual courage and humility we all need to practice forms of collaborative, responsive, responsible leadership.

Leadership here is not just a role we perform.

Not just telling others what to do.

Leadership here is inquiring to understand more, inspiring by example, creating new ways to work together to find solutions in shared purpose.

Not just to point out what’s wrong with the world, but to frame the questions that lead to understand and help fix it together.

Not just to serve ourselves, but to put our attention on others and commit to the success of those around us. (This is the essential key to the wild success of our multiple-year, world-championship Model UN team.)

Not just to seek the results or the returns on our investment, but to reinforce the principles, the values, the qualities of our character, the deeper ethos of our commitments—to create a return on our values.

That is how we do the big things at CMC.

We counter ignorance with the search for truth. We replace the ad hominem attacks and conclusory opinions with open inquiry, empirics, and reason. We diagnose deeper causes for clues about the solutions. We search for the connections between diverse bodies of expertise and work through and across our different disciplines. We listen actively to what we may not want to hear. We debate respectfully always in search of a more persuasive answer. We bring people together, find common ground, reconcile conflicts, solve problems through constructive dialogue. We put these key elements of learning to work.

To grow new solutions into scalable businesses; to develop effective policy that improves the human condition; to build consensus in a world that often appears not to want it.

And this is also how we do the small things.

The moments of goodness that make a big difference in our lives and those of others.

Own our role in a personal conflict. I’m sorry.
Pose the caring question. Are you okay?
Help someone in need:  Let me give you a hand.
Do something new: I will try this.

Here we fight the banality of evil with the banality of good, small intentional gestures of kindness. We fight the power of inertia with the force of our commitments.

That’s why we are at CMC, why we are here.

(the here)

Okay, if we get the why; why then Claremont McKenna College? Why are we here?

In sum, the here of our College, our classrooms, our programs, our campus, our community—every urgh, pore, square inch is structured to serve that greater purpose.

Because here, you will work hard to learn from the intellectual power of our outstanding liberal arts faculty: not what to think, but how.

How to ask better questions, write, critique, compute, code, build AI, theorize, gather evidence, isolate, add, and subtract assumptions, reason, disprove the null hypothesis, mitigate the tradeoffs, persuade, solve sticky problems. How to understand and strategize in response to the wicked challenges, those that sit at the intersections of colliding, obdurate forces. Through capstone projects, the thesis, and the advanced research opportunities with our faculty and institutes, centers, and labs.

How to develop the closest friendships of your lifetimes across differences and barriers and borders; live all together in the dorms; form strong relationships with each of us. Relationships that so strong that they provide the mutual respect and trust we all need to learn and take on our challenges.

All at the core of our Open Academy commitments: the courage to speak up with respect; the openness to share and take in diverging viewpoints at the Athenaeum; the intellectual and social commitment to reconcile them, through constructive dialogue, even on the most difficult topics; in the classroom, the CARE Center, and the widest range of student programs across the campus.

You will put that learning to work on your own and through collaborative teams: on campus and off, leadership in ASCMC and student organizations; peer coaching, competitive athletics, (including my favorite, inner-tube water polo!) through the pure fun of residential life; in expanded opportunities for summer internships and experiences, exploratory career treks, study abroad, and more.

You will be the second class to take our new, revolutionary Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences curriculum and the very first to enter our new, iconic, acclaimed facility, the Robert Day Sciences Center.

You will see the gravel pit across Claremont Boulevard transform into a world-class Sports Bowl and other significant capital projects over your time here.

All of this is here, to empower your CMC cycle of learning and doing.

Learning to do. Doing to learn. Learning to learn.

So that you can keep ahead of and influence the changes you will face in your lifetime.

Prepare for what we cannot anticipate, the unknown unknowns, the questions not yet framed, the unexpected turns of life, your future world of affairs.

That’s why we are all here at CMC.

(the we)

Okay, after we get the why and the here, finally, why are we here?

All of us are here to help you author your own lives, find your own purpose, build your own community, help you to take care of yourselves, empower you to remove the obstacles and barriers in your way, coach you as you develop the foundations, qualities, and capabilities that you need to thrive and that the world—that we all—need from you.

And you are here because you chose us, and we chose you.

How is it that out of ten applicants you were the one? (You may wonder.)

You may experience moments of self-doubt.

I know I did when I started college.

My first language placement test (100 questions, 4 multiple choice answers). My score. 25.

I could have just filled in all of the bubbles randomly and gotten the same result.

I still remember the D-plus on my first exam.

For the longest time, I was convinced I was failing out.

That became a source of power, I’ve come to understand.

Self-doubt is not only understandable, it’s essential. It is a condition for learning and self-improvement.

Indeed, doubt, not certainty, is the foundation for extraordinary achievement. The most over-confident people have the least clue of their inabilities. Humility is not only a virtue. It is a powerful capability.

Some of the most influential insiders think of themselves as outsiders. The smartest people in the room presume they are the dumbest.

This is how we learn from others, master expertise we do not have, gain respect and trust through putting our attention on others.

Without self-doubt, we’re probably not challenging ourselves enough. Without a modest level of insecurity, our standards are probably not sufficiently high.

When you experience those moments, I want you to remember: we all share that feeling; we are all imperfect. We are all still trying to figure it out.

And whenever someone imposes insecurity on you, puts you down, tells you what you cannot achieve, don’t over-listen or internalize that.

Send them to me, and more importantly, prove them wrong.

We all make mistakes and have to learn through moments of failure and disappointment. That produces the invaluable emotional and intellectual resource we call experience.

Remember that leadership and the professions are practiced, never perfected.

We are all here to learn from our mistakes together, support one another with the grace of error, lift ourselves when we’re down or disappointed, sad or lonely, and celebrate one another too when we’re up.

Most importantly to me, I want you to know deep down that you are here because we believe in each of you and what you can contribute. What we can each learn from you.

We love and support each of you unconditionally and, as a vital aspect of that support, we will push you to embrace the highest expectations you can have for yourself, too.

We chose you because we saw something special.

Not just the hard work. Not just the objective academic achievements: the GPAs and the test scores. Not just the leadership roles and community service. Not just the successful athletic performance or debate competition.

But something more significant: something less quantifiable, something unique in each of you as human beings on this earth. Who are searching to do more than merely what is expected of you. Eventually to discover and commit to what you expect of yourselves.

You each bring: a spark, a charm, a spirit, an energy, a drive, a social generosity, an impulse to lead; a commitment to chart your own path, to open up to new experiences and viewpoints, including those vastly different than your own.

To contribute to those around you, make friends, and build community through and across those differences. To help a group solve a problem. To grow comfort with the discomfort of trying new things, and through that experience, to turn your weaknesses, your self-doubts, into the courage of new strengths. Your super-powers.

So, this is why we, all of us together, are here.

Why you, why we, each, all belong here.

To learn, together, to lead, to succeed in the contributions we want to make.

This is why we are so moved, so fortunate, so fired up to have you and your families join us here today.

So inspired by your every step across this threshold.

So now, with cherished family stories in our heart: the gift of savings from our crumpled envelope, our heads spinning in disorientation, the last reassuring hugs and loving thanks, tissues in hand for tears dripping down our cheeks, we savor this moment, this threshold you cross.

Today, you take responsibility.

Responsibility to learn, to lead, for yourselves, for all of us.

So dear students, dear friends, soak it all in, every second of this momentous day.

Cheers and many congratulations to you all.