Commencement Student Speaker Will Share BU Experience with the World

Debra Marcus (CAS’16) is coached on her Commencement address delivery by Kenneth Elmore (SED’87), associate provost and dean of students, during a run-through. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

As this year’s Commencement student speaker rehearses her speech in an empty George Sherman Union auditorium, Kenneth Elmore, associate provost and dean of students, has some suggestions: Don’t touch the mic, don’t look at yourself in the monitors, and don’t listen to yourself over the speakers.

At times, Elmore looks like an orchestra conductor, raising his hands to indicate a pause or tapping them to remind her to slow down. He confides that he still gets nervous sometimes speaking in front of huge crowds.

“I’m excited—it’s starting to feel real now,” Debra Marcus (CAS’16) says at the end of the session.

Marcus will deliver her address before an estimated 25,000 people during Boston University’s 143rd Commencement exercises on Sunday, May 15. The transfer student (she describes herself as “five-eighths of a Terrier”) says that although her time at BU was shorter than many of her classmates’, the experience was especially transformative. Her speech will play on the theme of transformation, and she will expand on a recent conversation with a family friend going through her own college choice ordeal.

“She is a high school sophomore and was dead set on going to a college that doesn’t have the world’s highest acceptance rate,” Marcus says. “I’m friends with her, and her mother asked me to talk about what it’s like to apply to, and choose, a college. Not dissuade her from applying to the school, but remind her that other options existed. We ended up talking a lot about my experience at BU, which was the first time I’d had that conversation with someone I didn’t go to school with. That meant a lot to me and got me to reflect.”

Each spring, graduating seniors are invited to submit a potential Commencement address to a faculty committee. This year, the committee weeded through 41 submissions before settling on 5 finalists, who then had to deliver their speech in a mock Commencement setting. When Marcus heard that she had been chosen, she says, she collapsed in her room from excitement.

“I was a member of the selection committee, and this was probably the toughest year we have had in my 12 years of doing this,” says Elmore (SED’87). “Debra has performed spoken word before, and I really like that her speech has some rhythm and good flow and beats. I think that Debra tells a couple of really wonderful stories that I think are a blessing.”

Marcus comes from the small rural town of Wellington, Fla., and as a high school senior chose to attend Brandeis University. She moved to Waltham without ever visiting the Boston area. The school turned out to be more isolated and smaller than she had hoped, but she loved Boston and decided to transfer to BU halfway through sophomore year. As she told her family friend, she feels like she made the right decision.

“At BU, we are in the middle of Boston,” she says. “There are the partnerships we have with museums and theater houses and places where we can show a student ID and go, all of the cultural institutions that the school is tied to that its students get access to. The amount of resources is so great—you can literally find anything.”

Once here, Marcus found her stride quickly. She chose a double major, psychology and music, in the College of Arts & Sciences, a combination that may seem unusual, but that she enthusiastically recommends. The dual major allowed her to take a music and ideas class offered through the history department and a class on music and the civil rights movement.

Her music background (she plays both piano and saxophone) also informed her job working at the Tsai Performance Center and her role as the sound designer for the student performing group Stage Troupe, working on shows like Dog Sees God, Seussical, and Into the Woods. “They cemented BU as the right place for me,” she says.

“It took me until the end of last semester, the beginning of this one, to feel like I’d hit my stride and found a rhythm, a routine,” says Marcus, who plans to pursue her passion for music and is currently interviewing for audio engineering jobs. “College is a strange bubble as it is, but BU’s bubble was so inclusive… I will miss that.”

More information about Commencement can be found here.