Welcome to the 2022-23 Academic Year

Dear Emory Community,

Welcome to the 2022-2023 academic year and the start of the first full week of classes! This is a time when we celebrate new and returning members of our community through campus rituals like move-in, orientation, and Convocation. This year, in addition to our cherished Coke Toast, first-year students here on the Atlanta campus officially celebrated their Emory matriculation by passing through the Haygood-Hopkins Gate, cheered by faculty and staff on their way to the Quadrangle. On our Oxford campus, students celebrated with a traditional candlelight procession following Convocation.

This meeting of innovation and tradition, of old and new, offers us all a time to reflect. Over the next few weeks, before you settle into the routine of the semester, I encourage you to consider what brought you to Emory—whether you’re a student, a staff member or on the faculty. Has your sense of purpose shifted and grown? How do you express it in your work and interactions with others?

As we move through this academic year with new ideas and goals, it is my hope that we keep sight of our purpose and anchor ourselves to the values that reflect us at our best—curiosity, innovation, leadership, respect and collaboration, purposeful reflection, and above all, service to humanity.

Here at Emory, we do good. In boundless ways we sustain life and endow it with meaning. We have supported each other through a pandemic and generated solutions to sustain health. We add vibrancy to life through creative works and bold art. We seek truth through writing and research. We discover and invent new therapies to save lives. We are entrepreneurial. We add hope through our fight for racial and social justice. We have so much to be proud of, and there’s much to look forward to in the year to come as we each learn, grow and flourish.

May our purpose propel us as we take on new tasks, face new challenges, and contribute to the greater good of the university and humanity at large. I am, as always, proud to be an Emory Eagle and proud to be your provost.

Ravi V. Bellamkonda
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs