Khoury News

At the water’s edge, Khoury College’s 2026 graduates reflect, revel, and reimagine

At the Leader Bank Pavilion in Boston's Seaport District, the message to graduates was both straightforward and layered: "Technology is driving a period of blinding change. Now it's your turn to take the wheel."

April 29, 2026

by Milton Posner

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Khoury College’s Boston-based commencement celebrations were about embracing the new.

This was evident in the choice of setting. With Matthews Arena having been demolished weeks prior after more than a century of service to Boston’s sports ecosystem and cultural life, the graduates and their families gathered at Leader Bank Pavilion, a tented amphitheater overlooking Boston Harbor.

But it was also evident in the charge to the graduates, which exhorted them to remain versatile, vocal, and optimistic in their work as AI upends past ways of work and learning.

With a beaming Dean Elizabeth Mynatt looking on since she had lost her voice, Senior Associate Dean Ben Hescott served as her vocal stunt double, urging the students — 844 undergraduates in the morning and 680 graduate students in the afternoon — to turn the AI upheaval to their benefit.

“You are entering the field on the ground floor of this next wave of technology expansion,” Hescott said. “Workers and companies will respond by doing more, moving faster, and creating software and services that we can barely imagine. The world needs versatile, capable programmers who can harness AI in a growing number of industries.”

As young professionals, Hescott continued, the graduates will guide workplaces as they absorb AI tools into their workflows and will help set guardrails for when and how AI is used, as well as which data it collects.

“You will need to reach beyond your technical skills to higher levels of critical thinking … It will require the courage to stand up and find your voice, at a time when maintaining your voice and holding on to your purpose has never been more important,” he reminded them. “I ask you to remain resolute in the mission of Khoury College — that computer science is for everyone, and that everyone should benefit from computer science.”

It was a sentiment echoed by data science and economics student Misha Ankudovych, who delivered the undergraduate student address. His message centered around Khoury College’s Oath for Computing Professionals, which calls on new graduates to protect the well-being of all those affected by computing systems. Many of the graduating students, including Ankudovych, were in the audience when the oath was first introduced to incoming students in September 2022.

“Some of us were still figuring out how to log into Canvas … and now, we were also promising to protect the dignity of our society and of our future profession,” he remembered. “At first, the oath felt symbolic, memorable, maybe even a little strange. But as I’ve come to appreciate, Khoury College played the long game.”

For Ankudovych, Northeastern’s core concept of “experiential learning” became about more than just doing consequential work. It also included double-checking intuition with documentation, understanding how assumptions shape outcomes, and reckoning with how his output affected real people.

“Somewhere along the way,” he noted, “the oath started to make sense and responsibility stopped feeling abstract … It wasn’t asking us to be perfect. It was asking us to be intentional, to remember that the systems we build may shape the world, and more importantly, that we are accountable for the choices we make.”

Master’s student speaker Daniela Alejandra González, who adds an MS in Data Science to a biopharmaceutical research career that already encompasses a doctorate and a Fulbright Scholarship, also took a wider view, albeit in a different fashion. With a nod to the higher purposes of science and the personal journeys of the graduates, she broke down Northeastern’s motto of lux, veritas, virtus (light, truth, courage).

“Science taught me that truth does not come because you want it to. It comes because you refused to stop looking. That persistence is what I brought with me here,” González said. “And Khoury College gave me something powerful in return: the tools to look at old problems in entirely new ways.”

And as for light and courage?

“This class is full of people who found the light on their own — people who studied between jobs, who learned across time zones, who translated not just words but entire ways of thinking,” she said. “Every person here had a moment when it would have been easier to stop. And you didn’t. That is what brought us here today.”

González concluded her speech by balancing Northeastern’s motto with that of her alma mater, the National University of Tucumán in Argentina — pedes in terra, ad sidera visus (feet on the ground, eyes toward the stars).

“Keep your feet on the ground, in the data, in the evidence, in the rigor this education has given us. And never stop looking up,” she said. “Carry the light into rooms that need it. Hold on to the truth. And have the courage, always, to cross whatever border stands between where you are and where the world needs you to be.”