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Kamille Davis may have followed her brothers to RIT, but she is a leader in her own right. As the third in her family to graduate from the mechanical engineering technology program, Davis set her own pace early—excelling in classes, on the basketball court, in the laboratory, and in the community.

Eric Avar ’90 (industrial design), Nike’s vice president and creative guide of innovation design, has been selected as a 2021 commencement speaker on May 14 and 15. Avar, who was honored with the College of Art and Design Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016, joins Andrea Ghez—a 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics—as the university’s first-ever dual commencement speakers during a two-day celebration of the Class of 2021.

RIT’s Class of 2020 is getting a bonus opportunity after last week’s virtual conferral of degrees — a ceremony in the video game Minecraft that will allow them to virtually walk across the graduation stage, receive a diploma from “Minecraft Munson” and take a photo with the Tiger statue.

Friday’s celebration of the Class of 2020 certainly cannot replace the atmosphere of a traditional commencement, which RIT plans to host on campus when it’s deemed safe. But many of graduates say they won’t let the pandemic, or the circumstances surrounding the virtual celebration, define them or their feelings about their time at RIT. (Pictured: Bradley Speck, who will finish his classes online this summer, has a job waiting for him at GE Aviation in Cincinnati, where he completed four co-ops.)

For more than 50 years, the New York State Arthur O. Eve Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) has provided academic support, financial assistance, and advocacy for eligible students who would otherwise be excluded from higher education due to academic and economic disadvantage.

Graduating senior and first responder Bryon Campbell spent his final semester at RIT on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic. A New York State Emergency Medical Technician and Certified Flight Paramedic, Campbell volunteered more than 35 hours per week with Shortsville Fire and Ambulance in Shortsville, N.Y.

Eight years ago, as a high school junior, Peter Yeung participated in NTID's Explore Your Future, a program that introduces deaf and hard-of-hearing high schoolers to career opportunities. Today, Yeung is an RIT/NTID graduate who has completed three degrees and has started his career as a user experience architect with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield, Va.

KayLee Steiner knows her way around a research laboratory. Her extensive undergraduate research experience made her an appealing candidate when she began applying to Ph.D. programs. After receiving offers from top-notch graduate programs including Duke, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and others, she will pursue her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine.

Just because computing security student Jack McKenna is graduating, that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop learning. In his new job as a cybersecurity researcher at MITRE, McKenna, will constantly be on the lookout for new ways to use computing security techniques in order to help strengthen the nation’s cyber defenses.

RIT student John Fox credits his time in the U.S. Marine Corps for teaching him about accountability, focus, and dedication—all while developing his passion for logistics and supply chains. Fox, who is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in supply chain management, will begin his career in July as an area manager in Amazon’s Fulfillment Center in Rochester.

Alyssa Owens is contributing new ways to diagnose breast cancer and Poornima Kalyanram has discovered how fluorescent molecules might help to identify diseased cells. Karen Soule and Fatemeh Shah-Mohammadi are part of breakthrough work in developing carbon nanotubes and cognitive radio networks—advances in technology that will power tomorrow’s electronic devices. All four are on track to graduate with a Ph.D. in engineering.

Keynote speaker John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox Corp. and director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), told graduates during this morning's convocation ceremony that they are entering “the Imagination Age, an age that calls for new ways to see, to imagine, to think, to act, to learn and one that also calls for us to re-examine the foundations of our way of being human, and what it means to be human.”