BU Commencement Student Speaker: Say “Yes” to New Opportunities

BU Commencement Student Speaker: Say "Yes" to New Opportunities

Jason Wexler (COM'25, Questrom'25) will reflect on the Class of 2025's resilience and enthusiasm when he takes the podium Sunday

Jason Wexler has been a lot of things at BU: a Trustee Scholar, a dual degree student, a singer, a table tennis player, a fraternity brother, an entrepreneur, an e-board leader, and a Student Government candidate, for starters.

He has one last commitment to fulfill before he graduates: Wexler (COM'25, Questrom'25) will be the student speaker at Boston University's 152nd All-University Commencement on May 18.

He says his speech will center on the power of saying yes, which he clearly has personal experience with, given the number of extracurriculars he participated in during his four years at BU.

"The speech is all about how we had to say yes to new opportunities along the way," Wexler says. "We had to fill in the e-board roles that were left open; we were the first ones back in classrooms where professors were getting used to teaching us in person again… Toward the beginning of the speech I define the butterfly effect, and how saying yes to something small can lead to something huge, and how we are where we are now because of all the small yeses we said along the way."

The speech will also applaud the resiliency of the Class of 2025: they began their freshman year during the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst daily symptom attestations, weekly COVID testing, and constant mask-wearing.

The San Diego native says when he was a high schooler checking out colleges, he realized that he loved his area so much that if he didn't move to another city for college, he'd likely never leave. He chose BU to experience something new, including the city's change of seasons.

When he arrived on campus, Wexler quickly filled his schedule with extracurriculars. He's in two fraternities-Alpha Kappa Psi (a professional business fraternity) and Alpha Epsilon Pi (BU's Jewish fraternity)-and he cofounded and is vice president of the BU Blockchain Club. He's a member of the BU Stock Trading club, the Table Tennis club, and the BosTones a cappella group. He's also involved with the BU Filipino Student Association and is on the Hawaiian Cultural Association e-board. (He is neither Filipino nor Hawaiian, but he wanted to join to learn about, and celebrate, those communities, he says.) In addition, he found time to participate in Student Government, and he was part of the four-person team that won Questrom's 2023 $50,000 Sustainability Case Competition.

"I have felt that my time at BU has been very holistic, in the sense that I feel like I've tried my best to meet as many people as possible, and to really get the most of my college experience since I wanted to join as many clubs as I could," Wexler says. "And so, because of that I felt like I had a good idea of what our class was all about."

He took his academic work just as seriously. He has a double major, in the College of Communication (as a film and television major, with a concentration in innovation entrepreneurship) and in the Questrom School of Business (in business administration). He was also in the College of Arts & Sciences on the premed track.

That combination of disciplines helped inspire Wexler to launch a business. Called Solstis, it's an AI-guided first-aid kit that walks the user through emergencies with step-by-step support. The project will become Wexler's full-time job after graduation, and he has a staff of two part-time undergrads who will work on the project as well.

"I have a lot of friends who are EMTs, who see people call an ambulance for [something] that could have been Googled; people don't know what's going on, so they panic," Wexler says. "Our slogan is 'Confident care anywhere.' We want to make sure that people have the knowledge to perform first aid. The statistic we like to share is that according to the American Red Cross, 59 percent of deaths caused by injuries could have been prevented if proper first aid had been administered."

One of the people who've mentored Wexler on his entrepreneurial journey was Samantha Zyontz, a Questrom School of Business clinical assistant professor of strategy and innovation. She says his knack for storytelling and his huge number of interests make him a terrific choice for student speaker, and she wasn't at all surprised when she learned he'd been selected. "He's a born leader and very charismatic," Zyontz says.

While Wexler has spoken in front of several hundred people before (at the annual QuestromTalk competition), he's never addressed a crowd of 20,000-plus. But he's not nervous about his turn at the Nickerson podium on Sunday.

"When Dean Jason Campbell-Foster called and told me the news, I started doing a little dance on the phone that he couldn't see," Wexler says. "I accepted and then immediately called my mom. I'm super excited to be able to represent our class."

As the big day nears, people keep asking him how he feels about graduating.

"A lot of people say, 'I'm so excited to get out of here,' but that's never been my response," he says. "My response is always, 'I'm so sad.' I'm excited about the future, but I'm really sad to leave BU, because I feel like I've just had such an amazing experience."

Find more information about Commencement here

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