Earlier this month, our community gathered at McCamish Pavilion for five inspiring ceremonies to celebrate nearly 6,000 new bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral graduates. Families and friends joined with faculty and staff to honor and welcome in a new generation of scientists, engineers, artists, designers, policymakers, business leaders, and tech entrepreneurs. These Yellow Jackets have the talent, confidence, awareness, and drive our world so urgently needs right now.

Georgia Tech is committed to transforming medicine by developing breakthrough devices, diagnostics, and drugs to help healthcare providers fight the most complex and harmful diseases. This kind of medical innovation requires world-class research working side by side with startups and well-established companies that can translate our discoveries into products and place them in the hands of physicians and patients. That’s why we developed Science Square, Atlanta’s first medical research and technology district.

For as long as there has been a Georgia Tech, students have sung and danced, acted on stage, played all sorts of music, painted and sculpted, and written poetry. And since it became possible, they have also created interactive art, films, and video games. Historically, though, the arts happened on the sidelines — in clubs and extracurricular programs intended to enrich student life, not as part of the academic experience itself.

Georgia Tech students ran away with this year’s National Security Agency Codebreaker Challenge, a competition that tests the country’s best cybersecurity students. Out of 448 colleges and universities, Georgia Tech finished first for the third year in a row. Even better, our friends at the University of North Georgia finished right behind us in second place, making this the fifth consecutive year that one of our schools has earned the top prize!

Georgia Tech is one of America’s top research universities and No. 1 among those without a medical school. This distinction is about far more than bragging rights. Rather, it is a measure of our impact in addressing some of the world’s most consequential challenges and of our central role in driving competitiveness and innovation in our state.