Few events inspire like Commencement at Georgia Tech. With the Atlanta skyline surrounding our historic stadium, you get to watch thousands of the best and brightest students from all over the world as they celebrate their fine work and prepare to go out and make a difference. As always, this new graduating class teems with the confidence, talent, and creativity our world needs, and I want to share just a few examples from this amazing group.

One of my great joys as president is having the opportunity to thank and congratulate our amazing students, faculty, and staff for their extraordinary accomplishments and service to our community. Each spring, we hold some of my most treasured traditions dedicated to doing just that.

Much of our internal work and discussions these days revolve around managing our growth. Demand for a Georgia Tech education is at an all-time high, and companies are recruiting our graduates in record numbers — both great signs of our value and reputation. But the growth in applicants has overwhelmed our capacity, and as a result, we have become the third most-selective public university in the nation — only UCLA and UC Berkeley are more selective.

One of the most consequential, yet often not well understood, parts of Georgia Tech is the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Established back in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station with a state investment of $5,000 (about $110,000 today) and a handful of part-time researchers, GTRI has since grown into a research powerhouse that brings in more than $833 million in annual funding and has an outsized impact on our state, our nation, and the world.

In mid-December, while we were wrapping up the fall semester, the National Science Foundation quietly released its fiscal year 2021 Higher Education Research and Development Survey, an annual report of research spending at U.S. colleges and universities. Our $1.1 billion of spending placed us at No. 20 in the nation. Only 24 institutions recorded expenditures of $1 billion or more, and for the second year in a row, Georgia Tech was the only one to reach that level without a medical school (medical schools account for about 25% of all research spending in the U.S.).