Editor’s note: This Q&A is lightly edited for clarity and style.
University of Wisconsin alum, Miss America 2023 and nuclear fuels engineer Grace Vanderhei has been chosen to be the UW Winter 2025 Commencement speaker and will address graduates Dec. 14.
The Badger Herald interviewed Vanderhei on her upcoming speech. See the transcript below.
How do you feel about being chosen as this year’s winter commencement speaker?
I’m incredibly excited and equally a little bit overwhelmed, because I know some people who are graduating this year. It’s exciting though because I remember being in this position. I remember sitting in those seats as I look toward the next chapter of life, and I remember wondering, what’s next and being equally scared and equally excited.
I can’t imagine what this year’s class of graduates are feeling and I can’t wait to have the opportunity to speak to them.
What is your connection to UW?
I went to UW. I graduated in the winter of 2023 with a bachelor of science in nuclear engineering. I was a student there for four and a half years. I loved my time at UW.
I was a part of the water ski team, so I was able to compete collegiately as sort of an athlete. It’s a club sport at Madison. It was not a varsity sport. So it wasn’t a full-fledged athlete moment, but it was as close as you can get. Aside from that, I was involved with our American Nuclear Society and a bunch of other things on campus, including the Rotary Club. Those were some of the favorites from my time there.
What have you done since graduating at UW?
My final year with UW was also spent as Miss America. It was an unusual year, I wasn’t on campus frequently — if at all. I came back for a couple of events, but I wasn’t living on campus anymore.
After I graduated in 2023 I took a couple of months to just be a human being. I actually went to Tanzania and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and did a safari and all sorts of fun stuff like that. I like to call it “the young and dumb trip.” My early 20s, where I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I don’t regret it one bit. If.
And I got engaged on that trip, ended up moving out to Delaware to start my full time position then. So now I work as a nuclear fuels engineer and clean energy advocate for Constellation, which is the nation’s largest nuclear fleet operator. They operate the most nuclear power plants in the U.S.
I get to work on a variety of different plants, which is a ton of fun as an engineer right now. I’m working on the restart of Three Mile Island unit one, which is a big deal because no nuclear power plant has ever been restarted before. I’ve continued to work as a nuclear fuels engineer for about a year and a half now, and I’m getting my MBA from Arizona State University right now, and I’m writing a book.
What is your book about?
It’s a book on optimism, so it’s structured in a way that helps people learn how to learn how to recognize their patterns of when they tend to spiral into negativity or things like that, and how they can shift their mindset to be optimistic and hopeful in scenarios that don’t feel that way — and how they can do it for themselves, for their close circles, so their family and friends, and then how they can do it in their workplace.
And then it kind of ends on this question of how can one person’s optimism impact the whole world. Because I think that every single human being wants to do better, and every single human being wants to see the world be a better place. It’s just finding a way for us to do that together.
What is going to be your speech’s focus?
One thing that I want all graduates to know is that, moving forward, you can make a five year plan. You can make a 10 year plan. You may not have a five year or a 10 year plan, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, don’t close any doors.
Keep yourself open, keep yourself ready to change, because you’re going to probably take a job or start a graduate degree or something along those lines, and settle. And settling is where we reach this lull. And sometimes it’s good to keep that door open and be ready for a little bit of change. So encouraging the graduates to not be afraid of change and to embrace it.
You have the rest of your life to work, right? You have the rest of your life to live and be an adult, and you’re only in college once, and so embrace it. Just enjoy this time, live in the moment and be sure to appreciate it as it’s starting to wind down.
