What Four Years Taught Me: Graduating Magna Cum Laude
June 8, 2026 | Personal Experience
One month ago today, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biological and Physical Sciences, Magna Cum Laude, with a double concentration in Biological Chemistry and Data Science and Analytics from the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. Saying that out loud still feels a little unreal. Four years is long enough that the beginning of it has gone soft around the edges, but recent enough that I can still feel how new and overwhelming everything was that first semester. Now that the dust has settled and the cords are hanging on a hook instead of around my neck, I wanted to take a moment to actually sit with what those years added up to, and what I am carrying forward from them.
The shape of it, on paper, was a lot of credits. I finished with roughly 170 earned, which meant several semesters of 21 or more credits stacked on top of each other. I did not set out to overload myself so much as I kept finding things I genuinely wanted to learn and could not bring myself to leave on the table. Biology and chemistry were the backbone, but the workload was real, and I am not going to pretend every week of it was fun. A good amount of it was stubbornness and a lot of coffee, in roughly equal measure.
More Than a Transcript
The parts I remember most were not the lectures. I competed in National Model United Nations as part of the Leon Charney Diplomacy Program, which threw me into rooms full of people who argue for a living and made me a sharper thinker for it. I studied abroad in France, which was equal parts incredible and humbling, since travel as a wheelchair user is rarely as simple as the brochure makes it look. Between those, I did research internships at the UF Scripps Institute in the Disney Lab, working on RNA-targeted therapeutics using Python and the HiPerGator supercomputer. That was the first time the science I was studying in class and the code I was teaching myself at night collided into one thing, and it stuck with me.
Somewhere in the middle of all the biology and chemistry, I fell in love with the computing side too. It started with data structures and algorithms, the unglamorous foundations, and grew into building genuinely creative systems and solutions. That is where Rockstar Health came from, the non-profit I founded to make 3D-printed power-wheelchair accessories, and InputConfig, an open-source macOS app I built to remap input devices for accessibility. Neither of those was an assignment. They came out of the simple realization that I could build the things I wished existed, and that nobody was going to stop me from trying.
The photos from graduation day capture the parts that a credit count never could. There is the golden hour by the campus lake, the long walk to the stage in front of the whole faculty, and the strange, perfect quiet of sitting in the regalia for the first time and realizing it was actually happening.
The Thesis That Got Personal
My honors thesis was titled "Uncovering a Novel Neuromuscular Condition," and it investigated my own undiagnosed neuromuscular disease. Researching the thing that lives in your own body is a strange and intense way to spend a final year. It blurred the line between student and patient in a way I did not always have the words for, but it also gave me a kind of focus I had never had on any other project. When the data is about you, you do not get to clock out from it. That thesis went on to win the Outstanding Thesis Award, and I was chosen to be the Honors College commencement speaker, which meant getting to stand up in front of my class and try to say something true about all of it.
The People Who Got Me Here
None of this was a solo effort, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I am beyond grateful for my four years at the Wilkes Honors College, and for every person who got me here from the very beginning. To my parents, who helped me through medical challenges from the day I was born and never once treated them as a reason to expect less of me. To the teachers who taught me how to excel despite severe hearing loss, who figured out alongside me what learning was actually supposed to look like. And to every professor and staff member who guided me, often in small ways they probably do not even remember, I owe a real debt.
Living with significant bilateral hearing loss and a progressive neuromuscular disease, and getting around as a wheelchair user, means that almost nothing about these four years was built with me in mind by default. A lot of the work was simply figuring out how to make a system meet me where I was, and a lot of the credit belongs to the people who were willing to rebuild the system a little so it could. That adaptability turned out to be one of the most useful things I learned, and it is not on any transcript.
What Comes Next
The mix I am walking away with is science, code, adaptability, and creativity, and I have no intention of separating those back out. I am continuing RNA-targeted therapeutic research at the UF Scripps Institute, and I am keeping Rockstar Health running, because accessible technology is not a side interest for me, it is most of why I got into any of this. The plan, as much as I have one, is to keep pointing all four of those things at problems that actually matter to people like me.
It is bittersweet to be done. I spent four years wanting to be finished and now I miss it a little already, which I am told is normal. But I am genuinely excited for what is to come, and for the first time the path forward feels less like a list of requirements and more like something I get to build.
Written by Ryleigh Newman