School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences 2025 Advanced Degree Ceremony
Master’s and doctoral degrees across multiple SHASS graduate programs were conferred during the ceremony.

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts. and Social Sciences held its 2025 Advanced Degree Ceremony on Thursday, May 29.
Graduates, faculty, and family members gathered for the ceremony at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Sonia Maria Pavel PhD ’25 delivered the student address.
In her speech, she emphasized the value of humanistic disciplines.
“The humanities, arts, and social sciences are not merely useful for the additional skills they develop, helping students be better future engineers, doctors, or lawyers or whatever other vocations they choose. They just are our vocation as human beings,” she said. “They are our ways of understanding ourselves collectively, of making meaning, and of defining our place in the world relative to other human beings and to non-human nature.”
Agustín Rayo PhD ’01, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS, echoed the importance of human understanding during his opening remarks.
“If you’re going to make the world a better place, you need to understand how it works. And that means understanding its economic, political, ethical – human – dimensions,” Rayo said. “The work that you do is critical to our future.”
Photos by Hanley Valentin.












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