Dear Freshman Dalila,
Remember that first day you walked across campus, backpack heavy on your shoulders, heart even heavier with doubt? The morning sun cast long shadows of the century-old buildings across manicured lawns that seemed too perfect for someone like you to walk upon. Those grand pillars and stone walkways weren't built with the children of immigrants in mind, or at least that's what you believed. You carried more than just your laptop and iPad that day — you carried the weight of your mother's sacrifices. You carried the bewildered pride of relatives who couldn't quite comprehend what it meant to attend such an institution, who nodded politely when you tried to explain your studies, but whose eyes revealed they were in awe that you were there at all. How strange to think that you would one day stand beneath these same archways with a degree in hand. The very thought would have made you laugh then, caught somewhere between hope and disbelief.
Remember those nights in the library, either in M-level or in the Brody reading room, when the fluorescent lights buzzed above like persistent thoughts, when tears blurred the words on the screen? When you called home and carefully constructed stories of confidence while sitting on cold bathroom tiles on B level, your voice echoing against the walls? You doubted every paper, every exam, every right you had to occupy your seat in those lecture halls. Yet somehow, your hand kept writing, your mind kept learning, your feet kept walking forward. Friends came like seasons. Some were summer, bright and intense but fleeting; others autumn, whose falling away taught you about letting go. A few became winter, enduring and clear in their loyalty. You learned that belonging isn't always about where you're from, but who walks beside you when the path grows difficult.
If I could whisper to you across these years, I'd tell you to look up more often. The days stretched endlessly then with problem sets that consumed weekends, papers that devoured nights, but the years? The years were there and gone in a heartbeat. I'd tell you to sit longer on Keyser Quad watching light filter through leaves, to laugh louder with friends over midnight meals, to breathe deeper when the spring flowers begin to bloom. Because one day, you'll blink, and suddenly you'll be writing the final page, turning in the last assignment, hugging the last goodbye, and moving away from the little life you’ve built the past four years. And in that blink, four years will have passed like a dream you're struggling to remember even as you wake.
But here's the truth: you did it. Against doubt, against statistics, against the whispers that people like you don't belong in places like this, you did it. Your graduation isn't just your achievement, though. It's the culmination of your mother's American dream. Your diploma bears one name, but it belongs to generations. Those behind you who never had the chance, and those ahead who will walk through doors you helped to open.
With love and pride for all you've become,
Dalila Cabrieles Rodriguez
Graduate of The Johns Hopkins University
