Dear Wake Forest student body,

Thank you for entrusting me with our collective college experience. My term has been wonderful, exhausting, exciting and trying all at once. Through it all, I have had the pleasure of working alongside talented student leaders to advocate for the needs of our student body. 

This goodbye is the most confusing thing I’ve written in a long time because it is filled with conflicting feelings of joy, sadness and gratitude. For the last year, through a pandemic, a fertilizer plant fire, rabid raccoons, protests, about one million surveys that are all the most important you’ll ever take (but actually, the Campus Climate survey was the most important, so thanks for taking it), a global conflict and whatever other crazy thing from which I’ve willfully dissociated, I have had the great pleasure of serving the Wake Forest community. 

Though it has been a challenging year of leadership, it has also been deeply rewarding, not least of all because I have seen campus come alive again after a 2-year-long hiatus from “normal” life. As I approach graduation and the end of my term, I know I am leaving behind a team of strong, compassionate, and driven student leaders who will accomplish extraordinary things. 

After we leave campus on May 16th, I don’t know what the next chapter of Wake Forest will bring, but I am sure that the next year will be different from the four that I have lived here. Yet, I am confident that when I return for a reunion five or 10 or 20 years from now, this place that has been my home will have blossomed under the next generation of student leadership. I think that’s the beauty of our Mother So Dear — she grows and changes with each new class yet she maintains the character that drew us to her in the first place. 

I want to be clear: not one single thing that happened this year, happened because of me, at least not me alone. If you are one of the amazing students I have worked alongside in my four years at Wake Forest, know that I appreciate your tireless efforts to support other students, to advocate with me when students rallied together, and to tell me I was wrong when I needed to hear it. My voice has not been my own this year; it has been ours, representative of 5,500 students who came together to call for a Wake Forest that serves her students first. 

College is a time for growth and change. I love Wake Forest for giving me a chance to grow with so many inspiring and passionate role models and friends. Thank you for some of the best four years of my life. It has been an honor to serve as your President.  

Catch you at homecoming, and Go Deacs!

Ally Swartzberg