Congratulations to our Graduates!

June 16, 2024 was a gorgeous afternoon and the perfect day for our second annual Design Diploma Ceremony. The d.school faculty presented 71 undergraduates and 11 graduate students with their Design degrees. We are so very proud of the work all of these students have accomplished, and can't wait to see what they do next.

2024 Degree Candidates

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN ENGINEERING IN PRODUCT DESIGN

Savannah Alter

Elena Atluri

Gabriella Bertran

Makayla Brown

Evan Burke

Abigail Cummings**

Michaël Dooley

David Durand

Ellee Eck

Liv Eisenhardt

Thomas Escudero

Ming-Wei Cyprien Fasquelle

Ben Fischer**

Alyssa Frederick

Melody Fuentes

Ananya Lakshmi Ganesh

Xolani Hodel

Robert Luke Joseph

Jannah Kara Vira

Bryce King

Caelan Koch

Haley Koo**

Symphony Koss

Zachary Larson

Fred Lee

Beckie Leigh

Abigail Celeste Leyva

Joyce Lin

Omar Martinez

Ulises Medina

Haley Mossmer

Seth Nguyen

Nhi Yen Nguyen

Valeria Paez Pulido

Yaa Pajibo

Grace Pan

Donghwan Park

Abigail Romo*

Juan Ruiz

Emmy Sharp

Nikita Tan

Sophia Taylor

Alex Tchang

Hillary Tran

Chanmarie Un

Pajntshiab Vang

Lanna Wang* **

Audrey Ward

Ameera Celine Waterford

Zakary Werdegar

Faith Zhang

Grace Zhang

FROM THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN DESIGN

Isabel Arboleda

Katie Han**

Okikiola Harriet Iriafen

Olivia Far Edgarian Jenks

Leslie Jin

Natasha Kacharia 

Salma Kamni

Jordan McElroy

Song Moua

Prashaant Ranganathan

Belem Salgado-Alvarez

Catherine Lucia Sarca

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE
INDIVIDUALLY DESIGNED MAJOR IN ENGINEERING

Andrea Cao Loia

Ian Lim

Itbaan Nafi

Dyllen Nellis

Maximus Reisner

Makenna Turner

MASTER’S OF SCIENCE IN ENGINEERING IN DESIGN IMPACT

Awua Buahin

Magnus Freyer

Hadil Asasfeh Habashneh

Bem Iordaah

Julia Jenjezwa 

Adil Jussupov

Carmen Leiser

Saad Sohail Riaz

Saige Sunier

Mihret Redda Tamrat

FROM THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
MASTER’S OF SCIENCE IN DESIGN

Yemariam Mamo

*Phi Beta Kappa Member
*Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society Member

Commencement Speeches

MS Design Commencement Speech

by Saad Riaz

What an absolute joy and privilege to have our families and friends from across the world join us today. We thank you, for we understand we could not have been here without you. I want to congratulate you for creating such creative genius babies, it’s not an easy task. Lawyer and doctor babies are easier to predict, with us you never really know what you’re going to get. 

Two years ago, 12 misfits from all around the world were brought together in a place we call the Loft to receive a design education. Every single one of you is so brilliant and unique — I couldn’t figure out how they found you, but also how the program was planning on teaching you. We don’t have a one-sized fits all curriculum here, rather everyone chooses their adventure based on their own curiosity. We can’t even throw a party and agree on what song the DJ should play. 

Personally, I came here with the aspiration to design a global design school where adults earn an income to learn. With the help and support of the faculty here with us today, I was able to scale the idea across 20 countries serving hundreds of adult learners globally for my capstone. It’s remarkable what you can achieve when you have the right people around you.

While researching the needs of learners globally I asked, “Who designed the world?” The predominant response, around the world and here at Stanford, was: “God designed the world”. Well, if God designed the world, I think I am God’s favorite person to prototype the world with.

When I was two years old, my family moved to Chicago from Pakistan. After years of hard work, we were able to build a home in America. It took about two decades for us to receive our right to live in the United States.

I never understood where I belonged or where I’m from. They say it’s difficult getting into Stanford, well, try getting into America. 

We had such a wonderful family and have lived such a beautiful life together, but the broken immigration systems and fracture points in our society did their best to steal our livelihood. I didn’t feel like our lives were different until I couldn’t get a driver’s license and most of all couldn’t think about going to college due to legal battles we were facing.

Reluctantly, I applied and went to college orientation. I started to wonder if this education thing is only for Americans, but who decides who is an American and who is not?

More importantly, who decides who gets to learn and who does not?

The next morning at orientation dad called to tell me our right to live in the United States was finally approved. That’s how I found out I was going to college — Kelly, talk about navigating ambiguity.

I grew up watching dad fight for our right to live here every single day — I would always try to understand what he was fighting for and why he wouldn’t just give up, but every time I looked at him, no matter what our circumstances were, he was undefeated. 

Dad, they didn’t want us to be here, but look where we are now. 

Who designed this world? These systems and structures in place — are they working for us or against us? There are clear fracture points in how our world functions today that require reimagining, rethinking, redesigning. 

When applying to this program, we were asked how would we make a dent in the universe? 

Something tells me you are not interested in putting a dent in anything, but rather you believe that we too are part of nature and you want to nurture, care for, and leave the world better than you have found it. I have seen you speak up and fight for what you believe since our first day together. 

I watched firsthand as Bem Iordaah took on the entire country of Nigeria’s challenges around healthcare, believing he could to his core, as if it was his responsibility for his people. Julia Jenjezwa challenged the entire planet — looked directly at the forces exploiting the potential of the entire African continent, and said, no more. Adil Jussupov, I sat next to you, and saw you stay up until 2-3 am in the morning every day at the Loft doing everything you could to help people who cannot see improve their ability to participate in a poorly designed world for people with different abilities. 

Who are you? We should celebrate people like you and I am honored to do so today.

We are the rebels, the misfits, who look at the world around us and challenge the way things are. I hope you never allow the voices of those who cannot fathom who you are to suppress your own voice and intuition.

Together, we believe that design is the most powerful tool we have to better understand the world around us, interject where there is need, and solve for the people who need it most. 

As our time together is coming to an end, I am reminded that we have limited time here in this world. I feel a sense of urgency and believe to my core in your ability to shape our world while uplifting the communities you are part of. I believe you will not only reimagine broken systems, but be the ones to create new equitable ones. In an increasingly polarizing world, I believe you, designers, may be the only ones capable of bringing the world together and creating harmony.

I wish you a life full with love, joy, and work that is meaningful to you. 

To our respected faculty, thank you for showing us so much love and care. For giving me and my family this honor and this respect. Thank you Carissa for giving us a shot. Michael for always giving us everything you’ve got. Kelly, Patrick, and Sean for teaching me how to teach and helping bring my own idea for a design school into the world.

David, thank you for creating a place for all of the rebels and misfits that are here today. Thank you for helping me find a home and figure out where I belong. I will always remember you. Class of ‘24 I have a feeling the world will always remember you for how you will add value to our universe.

Thank you.

BS Design Commencement Speech

by Ben Fischer

Dear graduates, faculty, family, and friends,

Like many of us here, when I was eight years old, I wanted to be an inventor.

Not just any inventor: I was driven to build the world’s first flying car. I had it all planned out. I realized the anti-gravity would need to be lightweight, so I remember, distinctly, opening up my family’s old desktop and googling the world’s lightest metal. Turns out it’s lithium. Great. So I planned to make the whole car out of lithium. Now I never quite got to the fabrication stage with the idea, but if there are any investors out here in the crowd, let’s chat.

 I open with that anecdote because not much has changed in the fifteen years since. For one, lithium turns out to be really important for future cars. For another, I’ve had a lot of wrong thinking. Just believing in that phrase — “wrong thinking” — is on its face an exact antithesis of what Stanford University professes to endorse. We, as a liberal arts, R1 research university are professedly all about learning right thinking, rigorous thinking, thinking that examines predicates and whose foundation rests on breath and depth.

Thinking with rules. Needs are verbs, not nouns. In our general requirements we’re course-corrected to believe that thinking the right way abdicates us from our errors. And yet, on this design journey with you, I haven’t felt like we were taught that ‘wrong thinking’ is indeed wrong. In fact, I think design teaches us the inimitable virtue of being totally, authentically, wrong.

The first mantra to strike me out of the d.school’s many, many, many mantras is to have strong points of view, held loosely. Here is the first piece of evidence that design so uniquely lets us be wrong. In mechanical engineering, if your machine does not hold its weight, it collapses. There’s no trickery. In design, we can test our points of view by simply bearing witness. If what we build eases pain or empowers possibilities, our thinking is proven right. Conversely, if what we try doesn’t work with others, that doesn’t make them wrong, it makes us wrong. So we move on. We build better.

The poet Mary Oliver gives three instructions for living life:

Pay attention. Be astonished.
Tell about it.

 I offer that as designers we have a different responsibility. We must:

Pay attention. Be astonished.
Do something about it.

We, over these past few years, have been taught to cultivate our astonishment into action.

Faculty, mentors, and peers seated here have given us some of the tools to unblinkingly take “wrong thinking” to task. Right around us, as air, are signs and symptoms of astonishing things. Astonishing things that duty-bound us to multiply joy or heal harm. And when we hold no pretense that our thinking might be wrong, it opens us up to other thinking being right. That’s scary, because when we shift convictions we stand in a liminal space between what we knew and what we are yet to believe.

In a sense that is exactly what design is. Design theorist John Chris Jones, who we all studied together a few years ago, defines design as the “imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities.”

We have collected, together over these years, new sets of facts about our lives. Take this year alone: we met cavers and divers, firefighters and tree-trimmers. Our cohort connected people through chairs and forae-ed serendipity. We reimagined mediation practices, captured sunlight, sprouted seeds. Just as these past four years were acts of design, this moment of graduating is one, too. Sitting here with friends by our sides and the future ahead, we are jumping from present facts to our future possibilities.

 Truth is, we don’t know where that will lead. We don’t know where our thinking might go wrong. But, in the words of Zhuangzi, a path is made by walking on it.

Graduates, let us walk our paths with astonishment. Let us be wrong. Let us do something about it. I’ll see you in our flying cars.