NYU president Linda Mills welcomed thousands of first-year students at two showings of the Presidential Welcome Reality Show at Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday.
The show, a biannual event at the university, took place at 9:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. and featured a speech from Mills, as well as a musical sketch performed by students.
“For some of you, this is your first time at NYU — it might be your first time ever setting foot in New York City,” Mills said. “For others, you’ve been here for years, or you know the university and the city very well, but you’re all here at NYU because you’re both deeply talented and ambitious. You believe in yourselves in the value of hard work and in having some freaking fun.”
Mills’ Presidential Welcome was her first major speech since her address at last year’s all-university commencement ceremony, where dozens of students walked out and booed in protest of the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In her address to the class of 2028, Mills spoke about bridging divides among students, using the 2024 Summer Olympics as an analogy for how to best form communities on campus.
“The intense conflict of ideas and perspectives can sometimes feel like the Olympics,” Mills said. “High stakes, fiercely competitive, but it also offers us all a rare chance to find common ground. It’s a space that may feel small, but it’s there, and when we decide to reach for it, to grasp it, to truly see through another’s eyes, it crackles with the possibility of transcendence.”
After the speech, student actors took to the stage to perform a musical-comedy sketch depicting common new student experiences such as homesickness, imposter syndrome and social anxiety.
Zoe Ragouzeos, the vice president for student mental health and wellbeing, has been working on the show since its inception in 2004 and told WSN that the musical continues to be an opportunity for the university to relay health and wellness messages to students in an entertaining way.
“Some of the issues are fundamental, and the kinds of things we portray are the same, things like meeting new roommates, meeting new friends, going out in New York City for the first time, boundaries,” Ragouzeos said. “A lot of these themes are ones that we have been grappling with since the beginning of the show.”
First-year Andrew Mowat said he enjoyed the vocal performances and choreography and wished that there was a way to listen to the songs on Spotify.
“The advice was sprinkled throughout the songs and super tasteful, whether through satire or directly stating it,” Mowat told WSN. “They brought up a lot of relatable struggles to a lot of people and I felt seen, and I know other people did too.”
Dylan Rose Smith, who performed in last year’s reality show and was in the audience this year, said that the show is a very collaborative process and that it is a good opportunity for students pursuing a career in the arts.
Smith also emphasized the importance of students connecting with each other on campus, and said that a sense of community is helpful to incoming first-years who may feel overwhelmed going to college in the city.
“As a freshman, I remember seeing the reality show and being really nervous to react in any way because I was sitting next to people I had no idea who they were,” Smith said. “It was really beautiful to see everybody being able to laugh, be loud and react, even around people that they just met. That’s very brave and exciting.”
Contact Krish Dev and Rory Lustberg at [email protected].
