Symposium Opening

*I am not delivering the opening remarks, but if I were, this is what I would say.*

Good evening, Everyone!

Welcome to the third annual E=mc2 Symposium! We’re all very excited that you’re here.

My name is Ben Goes. This year I have had the great privilege of working with 11 amazing students on their incredible research projects, with topics ranging from stand-up comedy to glial cell morphology in nematode worms. Through their projects, students struggled continuously with big, difficult, profound questions. Tonight you will have the opportunity to hear from each one of these students as they describe the questions they faced, the conclusions they came to, and the growth they experienced in the process. 

Tonight marks the end of an entire year of research and production for these students. Many of them will be graduating shortly. But, with the lessons these students learned during their time in E=mc2, I am confident that tonight is most definitely not the end of their learning. Education doesn’t just happen in school, and the goal of this class has always been to empower students to seek knowledge on their own initiative and use it to improve their world. This class, and the student work you will see tonight, stands for the propositions that information need not come from an authority figure in the front of a classroom, that learning does not need to be structured by a planned curriculum, and that one can be a student and yet still contribute something new to our most important fields of knowledge.

The speeches you will hear tonight are not book reports. They are not about the students, or their tangible work this year, but, rather, are presentations of ideas that the students have developed through their work this year. We invite you to not just listen, but to think along with them and consider the deeper lessons that they have learned.

Enjoy!