Adding a new twist to its traditional Commencement weekend program, on Sunday, May 24, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will showcase its new graduate student center and host a talk by one of its most distinguished alumni, international statesman Jaime Serra.
Graduate degree recipients and their families will be welcomed at the McDougal Graduate Student Center at an open house being held 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Visitors can partake of a complimentary breakfast 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and cold beverages throughout the day at the center, which is located on the first floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), 320 York St.
That afternoon, at 3:30 p.m., there will be a convocation in the HGS courtyard. The event will begin with welcoming remarks by Graduate School Dean Thomas W. Appelquist and Claudia Brodsky Lacour '84 Ph.D., president of the Graduate School Alumni Association and professor of comparative literature at Princeton University.
This will be followed by an address by Jaime Serra, Mexico's former minister of commerce and a chief negotiator of the NAFTA and GATT treaties. Serra, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1979, is the first foreign alumnus to join the Yale Corporation, serving as successor trustee since 1994. His government work included serving as economic adviser to the minister of France 1979-86 and as his country's deputy minister of revenue 1986-88. He is now senior partner in Serra and Associates International, a law and economics consulting firm based in Mexico City. In 1993, the Graduate School awarded him its Wilbur Cross Medal, presenten annually to graduates for exemplary achievements in their fields.
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