"You are glorious!"
UF College of Medicine Professor Dr. Azra Bihorac delivered the keynote address at the Summer 2025 Commencement ceremonies.
Provost Glover, trustees, faculty, staff, families, and friends — good morning! Congratulations to the University of Florida’s Class of 2025!
Wow! 800 graduates across 4 colleges, addressing real-world challenges from agriculture and life sciences to education, liberal arts, and business.
From the Lake Alice to the Turlington Plaza, you’ve left your brilliant mark on this Gator Nation!
To the 7,000 family members and friends: Thank you for your love, your worries, and your late-night encouragement.
To the faculty who challenged and shaped these scholars: Thank you!
Standing here before you, I share the same whirlwind of emotions — honor, humility, and, if I'm being perfectly honest, a touch of horror that I might disappoint you, confuse you with my 'New York' accent, or simply mess up.
And yes, Mom — I can hear your gentle criticism in my head: 'Slow down when you speak. Stand up straight. Smile.' It’s making me a little more self-conscious—and perhaps just a little better prepared.
But if I could calm that whirlwind for a moment, I’d begin with the sheer improbability of standing on this stage today.
I was born 5,236 miles away, 100 degrees east and 5 degrees north, in a small town in Bosnia, then part of Yugoslavia. Eight generations of my family lived there, through the reigns of two empires and a monarchy.
Apart from a brief detour for medical school ...
which felt like the Bosnian version of studying abroad ...
my fate seemed set:
I would be the ninth generation of my family rooted in our small town.
Yet in 1992, my country collapsed into a tragic civil war that shattered the lives of millions.
I fled with my family to Turkey, where I completed medical residency and fellowship.
In 1999, I arrived at the University of Florida to pursue research and training in critical care medicine and informatics.
By 2005, I was a tenure-track Assistant Professor — teaching, researching, healing.
UF became my home and my launchpad — a community of mentors, peers, and trainees who shaped me as a physician and scientist.
I consult my AI assistant, ChatGPT — affectionately named Algernon Funes, after the character with the perfect memory from a story by Jorge Luis Borges.
He considers the likelihood of me being here today as "extremely low," given historical turmoil, geographic isolation, and, of course, my “New York” accent.
So, what brought me here? Was it resilience? Discipline? Ambition? Or perhaps just an uncanny ability to navigate the criticism — I mean, supportive encouragement — of family and friends?
Class of 2025: These essential ingredients have shaped your remarkable journeys.
Each of you carries your own geography of improbability.
Some of you balanced farm work with coursework, taught while learning to teach, started businesses while studying business, or changed careers entirely to follow new passions.
And some of you got here by sheer stubbornness, caffeine, and that one friend who wouldn’t let you quit.
Graduates: You’re not strangers to the dark. You’ve burst through fire and yet, here you are.
Not in spite of those things, but with them, stitched into your story like a hidden thread of strength.
As they sing in The Greatest Showman: You are brave, you are bruised, you are brilliant. You have arrived, class of 2025.
My father used to say, “The universe’s spotlight is not on you,” teaching me humility whenever I complained — yet making it hard to share my story.
So here it is, in 144 characters:
A journey through a series of unfortunate events, guarded by a magical shield of love and openness — bestowed upon me by God, the universe, and fellow travelers.
My improbable story includes many unexpected turns and unfortunate events:
- Becoming a single mother on my twentieth birthday.
- Leaving my one-year-old son 200 miles away with my parents to finish medical school.
- Fleeing war at 27 with one suitcase and a few hundred dollars sewn into my coat.
- Teaching myself Turkish backwards from English textbooks.
- Arriving in Gainesville in 1999, with two suitcases and a four-year-old daughter- starting over, again.
- Learning to drive for the first time at the age 36.
My AI assistant recalculates odds of me being here, adjusted for war, single motherhood, and multiple relocations, as less than one in ten thousand. Approaching zero.
Yet, here I am, defying odds and algorithms.
The universe's spotlight may not be on us, yet its mysteries reside quietly within each of us.
As Anne Michaels writes in Held, "Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven."
At the heart of each of us lies a precise, yet immeasurable mystery ...
something numbered yet countless,
existing in memory and our bodies,
persisting even when forgotten.
Like love, bruises, forgiveness, and courage.
Unmeasurable by binary code, the exquisite non-algorithmic quality of being human.
Class of 2025: Like those mysteries, your journeys have been deeply personal, shaped by your contradictions.
You’ve made decisions no one saw.
You endured nights when no one was watching.
You may not have sewn money into a coat, but you’ve carried your invisible burden.
Yet, you marched on, drowning out sharp words with resilience.
Graduates: Perfection is often revealed in those intentional errors that make you who you are.
In stories you tell even when no one seems to be listening.
Stories told on a battlefield, a life raft, a hospital ward at night.
As Michaels writes, “The stories told to one who survives… who tells it to a child… who writes it down… to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own.”
What we give cannot be taken from us.
You are brave, you are bruised, you are who you are meant to be. You are glorious, class of 2025!
What carried me through these storms was not logic or luck — it was love.
The kind Anne Michaels describes: The deliberate error in a fisherman’s sweater, set intentionally to prove love’s perfection.
Love shown by my family, who taught me how to give your life and give up your life — who loved me with unconditional generosity, even when they had nothing left.
Love that insists you are destined for greatness.
Love extended by friends, colleagues, and trainees who taught me how to measure friendship in extremity — those who stayed when there was no map and no promise of return.
Love that remains a shelter when all the walls collapse.
Love from my children and my husband, who forgave my absences — birthdays missed, field days skipped-moments spent tending to others' pain, chasing answers, or simply holding it all together.
Love that does not ask for perfection, a deliberate error that proves the sweater was made for you.
My entire life I was given the precious gift of being loved as I was — by God, the universe, and fellow travelers. It allowed me to embrace my broken parts, to transform them into strengths.
Class of 2025: You too, have been loved — fiercely, imperfectly, exactly as you are.
And in that love, you’ve learned how to love others: with compassion, with grace, with a courage shaped by uncertainty.
Carry that love forward. Let it be your strength, your signature, your error, your proof.
Let it mark you not as flawless, but as fully, gloriously human.
Graduates: In a future filled with promise of artificial intelligence, let your love remain the one code that cannot be written —
non-algorithmic, imperfect, and luminous.
Let it become the story someone else will one day tell, perhaps when they need it most.
You are brave, you are bruised, you are loved as you are. You are glorious, class of 2025!
If love was the first thread in my shield, openness was the stitch that kept it from unraveling ...
the courage to embrace life as it unfolds, in the presence of overwhelming fear and uncertainty.
Radical openness to experiences, ideas, and people.
Openness is what allowed me to cross borders, form friendships in new countries, learn languages backwards, and reinvent myself repeatedly in unfamiliar places.
In 2010, it led me to write my first independent grant despite strong discouragement from my advisors as I pursued a bold, unconventional idea at the time: using machine learning to reimagine patient safety.
Because sometimes, we don’t understand something; instead, we know it.
Class of 2025: Over the last years, you have opened yourself to new ideas and perspectives ...
questioning assumptions you once held as truth,
exploring subjects that challenged your worldview,
and learning that the most meaningful growth often comes from the most uncomfortable questions.
In these liminal places where openness meets uncertainty, you discovered not just answers, but the precise mysteries that make you human.
Graduates: As you step forward into your lives and careers, remember that radical openness is your extraordinary strength.
It is your bridge to empathy, your path to meaningful collaboration, and your catalyst for growth.
Hold tight to this openness, let it be the second thread in your magical shield, guiding you to become who you were always meant to be.
You are brave, you are bruised, you are becoming. You are glorious, class of 2025!
Class of 2025: At the threshold of a future shaped by uncertainty, artificial intelligence, and a changing world, your generation carries an extraordinary responsibility.
You will define what it means to be human in an era dominated by the promise of machines.
In a world where machines think faster than you and algorithms outperform ...
your humanity is not the flaw. It is the feature.
AI may replicate your efficiency, even your creativity, but never the precise, immeasurable mysteries that live within each of you.
Your greatest power is your radical openness: your courage to love, to embrace your scars, and to carry the unbearable lightness of your human existence.
To tell the stories no algorithm can remember.
Graduates:
The work ahead is not to become more like machines, but to become more deeply, courageously, gloriously human.
Today, I bestow upon you my magical shield of love and openness, a gift from my journey to yours.
Carry it forward with courage, tenderness, and joy as you shape our shared future.
Carry it into the classroom, the boardroom, the lab, the field.
Carry it into the world we’ve been waiting for you to shape.
You are brave. You are bruised. You are exactly who you are meant to be.
Congratulations, Class of 2025.
You are glorious.
