These First-Year Experience speakers build community among students while challenging, engaging, and inspiring them to start their college career with a fresh perspective.
Moustafa Bayoumi Journalist and author of How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America
Geraldine Brooks Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning March and the international bestselling People of the Book
Bill Burnett Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford and co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life
Ta-Nehisi Coates #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power
Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt Award-winning social psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious bias
Dave Evans Co-founder of Electronic Arts and co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life
Franklin Foer National correspondent for The Atlantic, New America Foundation fellow, and former editor of The New Republic
Anand Giridharadas Editor-at-large for TIME and author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Yaa Gyasi Author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom, and recipient of the National Book Foundation's 'Under 35' award
Phil Klay U.S. Marine Corps veteran and author of Redeployment, winner of 2014 National Book Award for Fiction
Carlotta Walls LaNier Youngest of the Little Rock Nine, civil rights advocate, National Women's Hall of Fame inductee
Jenny Nordberg Award-winning investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and author of The Underground Girls of Kabul
Gary Shteyngart New York Times-bestselling author of Little Failure, Super Sad True Love Story, and Absurdistan
Colson Whitehead Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys
Isabel Wilkerson Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste
Zachary R. Wood Former President of Uncomfortable Learning at Williams College, author of Uncensored, and free speech advocate