Bowdoin College held its 2013 Baccalaureate ceremony Friday, May 24, in Sidney J. Watson Arena, marking the official close of the academic year and celebrating the College’s 208th Commencement.

Former U.S. Secretary of State 2013 and honorary degree recipient Madeleine Albright delivered the keynote address. President Barry Mills presided over the ceremony, and addressed access to higher education and affordability, and the value of a liberal arts education.

Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster delivered “Voices from Bowdoin’s Past,” a Baccalaureate tradition in which he spoke of “Bowdoin and Diplomacy,” a nod to this year’s keynote speaker, Secretary Albright. Marissa Daisy Alioto ’13 delivered the student address, “A Tent in Manhattan.”

The entire ceremony was streamed live. Commencement will also be streamed live here on the BDS.

Read more about Baccalaureate and find links to the speeches here.

Photos by Michele Stapleton

Bowdoin holds its 208th Commencement ceremony at 10 a.m., Saturday, May 25, 2013, conferring bachelor of arts degrees on 464 graduates.

Schedule of events, answers to frequently asked questions and other Commencement information here.

Watch Commencement 2013 as it’s streamed live here.

The Undiscussed Leaders, left to right, Maria Montes ’13, Monica Das ’14, Kate Kearns ’14, Phoebe Joaquin ’15 and Veronica Verdin ’15. Absent members: Nasra Hassan ’13 and Tyler Silver ’13

Every year for the past six years, a large number of students have joined a special campus club called The Undiscussed to talk about challenging topics that can get buried under the debris of our daily duties and burdens.

Each spring, when The Undiscussed becomes active, participants focus on one subject to tackle. In the past, they’ve looked at identity, choice, image and space. This year, members took on the topic of (un)happiness to examine both happiness and its opposite.

Read the full story here.

Madeleine Albright

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered the keynote address at Baccalaureate 2013, on Friday in Sidney J. Watson Arena.

The entire ceremony, also comprising remarks by President Mills, Dean for Student Affairs Tim Foster and student speaker Marissa Daisy Alioto ’13, was streamed live.

Watch it here.

Secretary Albright is one of six people receiving honorary degrees at Bowdoin’s 208th Commencement Saturday, May 25. Commencement will also be streamed live here on the BDS.

Stirred by the memory at his daughter-in-law’s graduation this May, Dr. Rotbart recalls how his father — an uneducated fruit peddler in Colorado (his education had been disrupted by the Nazis) — fell to his knees sobbing after his son received his medical diploma.

“On that day, and again in a similar scene at my brother’s journalism school ceremony the next year, Dad was liberated from Auschwitz. He was no longer ’142178,’ a Nazi victim. My father could now stand face to face with doctors, journalists and other accomplished Americans,” Rotbart writes. “At his sons’ graduations, he graduated to freedom.”

Sarah Hirschfeld ’13

With months of free time stretching out before her in advance of her enrollment in the Bowdoin Teacher Scholars Program next January, senior Sarah Hirschfeld decided to take an adventure. She plans to bike across the country from Portland, Maine, to Santa Barbara, Calif.

“I could get a [summer] teaching job, but since I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, I figured why not try something crazy and adventurous,” Hirschfeld said recently, taking a break from studying for a microbiology exam. She wants to be a high school biology teacher.

But the conscientious biology major doesn’t just want an adventure for its own sake — she wanted to combine the experience with something more meaningful. So Hirschfeld will peddle with Bike & Build, a nonprofit that organizes cross-country trips for young people that combine bicycling with building homes for low-income families.

Read the full story here.

But this study has prompted backlash. Walter Willett, a leading Harvard nutrition and epidemiology researcher, commented, “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” Willett is worried that such conclusions could undermine policies to curb obesity rates and be misused by soft-drink and food lobbies to influence policy-makers.

Cindy Cammarn ’14 and Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, Photo courtesy of Jeopardy Productions, Inc.

Bowdoin junior Cindy Cammarn first had to make it through rigorous try-outs to qualify as a contestant for Jeopardy!’s College Championships, held this spring. She then went on to win the first round of competition to make it to the semifinals.

Even though she didn’t win her semifinal game, Cammarn gushed with enthusiasm recently as she described her experience on the famous game show. “It was 100% positive,” she said. It doesn’t hurt that she walked away with $10,000.

Read the full story here.

Compounding the problem is Oklahoma’s bedrock below the clay, which is limestone. Drilling steel reinforcements into the bedrock doesn’t work well because dry limestone becomes flaky. Plus, a steel-reinforced shelter can cost thousands of dollars, much more than most families can afford.

Daisy Alioto ’13

Trying to convince National Public Radio to hire her for an internship this summer, senior Daisy Alioto — who will be the student Baccalaureate speaker Friday evening — eschewed the old-fashioned cover letter typed on heavyweight stationery.

Instead, she turned to Storify, an online site that lets users tell narratives by compiling posts from different sources such as Twitter, Facebook, online news sites, blogs and more. (Alioto jokes in her Storify letter that the reason for this was because Grumpy Cat — the sour-faced kitty that has become an Internet sensation — ate her cover letter.)

Read the full story here.

Fortune magazine reveals the 10 companies that are not only America’s largest corporations but also great employers. Once again, Internet juggernaut Google tops the charts at #1, with notoriously great benefits such as free haircuts, gourmet sushi and fitness centers galore. Indicators for the ranking include work-life balance, training, pay and turnover.

Robert Greenlee

In a Bangor Daily News article, Bowdoin Professor of Music (and Oklahoma native) Robert Greenlee tells the hair-raising story of his experience in the devastating tornado. Having waited out the storm in the cellar of his parents’ home, mere blocks from the worst devastation, he described the tornado as sounding like “a thousand freight trains combined with continuous explosions.”

William Head Williams

Two years ago, Bill Williams ’69 and his wife learned that their 22-year-old son, William, was addicted to heroin. Shortly before William’s 24th birthday, he accidentally overdosed. When it was clear William would continue in a persistent vegetative state, his family removed him from life support.

“In the beginning,” Bill Williams writes in his New York Times op-ed “Ending the Secrecy of a Child’s Addiction,” the family kept their battle secret, both to shield their privacy and also out of a sense of shame. “How could we possibly explain the corrosion in the midst of our well-reared, respectable family?” Williams writes.

Williams reflects on how he and his family learned to open up and share their story, which in turn prompted others to speak about their experiences with addiction, all of them “quite separate from a world racing on.” These stories need to be told, Williams insists. “Secrecy and anonymity are part of the disease, for addict and family alike,” he says.

Illustration credit: Abby McBride

Violinist Timothy Kantor ’07 is this week’s Young Artist in Residence at the studios of Performance Today, America’s most popular classical music radio program.

A music major while at Bowdoin, Kantor earned a master’s degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and is now a doctoral candidate in violin performance at Indiana University. He was recently appointed concertmaster at the Evansville Philharmonic in Indiana, and he is a founding member of the Larchmere String Quartet.

Interviews and videos featuring Kantor are available as part of his profile on the Performance Today website, along with free downloads of performances.

Bowdoin raced four boats at Dad Vail the weekend of May 11-12 and all of them reached the semifinals, putting them in the top third of competitors at the regatta. Bowdoin is small compared to many of the schools at the regatta, and rowing is a tiny program within the College.

Even though the starters called “Buhdoyne” to the line, none of that mattered as seconds later the crew of Mary Bryan (MB) Barksdale ’15, Catherine Yochum ’15, Courtney Payne ’15, Sam Burns ’13 and coxswain Bonnie Cao ’13 were off to a fast race that earned them gold at the largest intercollegiate rowing event in the United States.

Read the full story by Sam Burns ’13.

(L. to r.) Madeleine Albright, Jean Arasanayagam, David Blight, Rose Marie Bravo, Philip Conkling, C. Lee Herter.

Many of the College’s six distinguished honorary degree recipients will soon be on campus sharing with the Bowdoin community and visitors fascinating insights on a variety of topics. View the schedule of talks and read more about the honorary degree recipients.