Three students in Rally Day hats, smiling.

Rally Day

One of Smith’s most enduring and exuberant traditions, Rally Day celebrates the power of the Smith community and the remarkable contributions Smith alums have made to our world. The day is highlighted by a festive all-college gathering at which distinguished alums are awarded Smith College Medals by the president. It is also the first time seniors wear their graduation regalia, often topped with creative hats, as they look ahead to life beyond the Grécourt Gates.

Save the date for Rally Day 2025—Thursday, February 20—and learn more about the 2025 Medalists.

Rally Day 2024 Videos

Rallying Through the Years

Since its inception in 1876, Rally Day has remained a cherished Smith tradition that has taken several forms. Whether through fun skits, imaginative hats, or basketball games against the faculty (yes, really), it’s always been a day of celebration.

Two members of the class of 1895 in caps and gowns on Rally Day.

1895

Two members of the class of 1895, Elsie Bourland and Marguerite Wells, participate in a mock trial of George Washington.
Students in white dresses singing.

1925

Members of the class of 1925 participate in the “Grand Class Sing.”
Students dressed up as guinea pigs.

1931

A group of students dressed as “guinea pigs” on Rally Day.
Seniors in 1957 performing a skit

1957

Seniors perform their skit “Cosmic Colic” onstage during Rally Day festivities.
Students perform a skit at Rally Day

1963

Students participate in the class skit competition.
A group of students listening to Maya Angelou

1975

Students listen to Maya Angelou, who received an honorary degree from Smith in 1975, in the Alumnae House.
Faculty members on the basketball court.

1977

Members of the “Faculty Flamingoes” basketball team on the court during Rally Day activities.
Ada Comstock Scholars on Rally Day in 1996.

1996

A group of Ada Comstock Scholars on Rally Day.
A group of seniors in front of John M. Greene Hall, in hats and gowns.

2002

A group of seniors pose in front of John M. Greene Hall.
Students cheer at Rally Day in 2017

2017

Students react to the announcement of Oprah Winfrey as Commencement speaker at Rally Day.
Students during the 2023 Rally Day awards convocation

2023

Students cheer during the 2023 Rally Day awards convocation.

Academic Regalia

Following Smith College tradition, graduating students wear academic regalia for the first time at Rally Day, three months before Commencement. For Commencement, graduating seniors should come dressed in their full regalia.

Academic regalia will be available for purchase at the Smith College bookstore in mid-to-late January. Seniors will receive email communication from the Events Management office when regalia becomes available. 

Those receiving financial aid have the option of participating in the Regalia Loan Program lottery offered through the Student Government Association. All students will be invited to enter the lottery in January and will be notified in early February as to whether they can receive regalia through this program.

Only students who receive Smith aid and are verified through Student Financial Services are eligible to enter the lottery. Questions regarding this program should be directed to the SGA office at sga@smith.edu.

Bookstore hours for Commencement Weekend '25 will be published later this spring.

Meet the 2025 Medalists

Four extraordinary alums will receive the Smith College Medal at Rally Day in February, in recognition of their contributions to their communities and the world.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel ’65

Historian

Nancy Weiss Malkiel is a renowned historian whose scholarship has shaped our understanding of civil rights, race relations, and higher education. Currently professor of history, emeritus, at Princeton University, Malkiel broke down barriers as one of only three female faculty members at the university in 1969, the first year of undergraduate coeducation, when she began her career there. She was the first woman to join Princeton’s history department. Later, she would go on to serve for a record 24 years as Princeton’s dean of the undergraduate college. Malkiel has a long and distinguished career as a writer and professor. She taught many of Princeton’s largest and most popular classes, including her signature course, The United States Since 1940, co-taught with her diplomatic historian colleague, Richard D. Challener. Through the years, she also taught classes on women’s history, African American history, and the history of higher education. She is the author of five notable books: The National Urban League, 1910–1940 (Oxford University Press, 1974), Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton University Press, 1983), Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 1989), Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2023), and “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2016), a comprehensive study of the movement by elite colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom to go coed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, Smith College published her senior thesis, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858-1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics. Malkiel served for more than 40 years on the board of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which she chaired for a decade; she served on Smith College’s board of trustees from 1984 to 1994. In 1997, Smith awarded Malkiel, who studied history as an undergraduate, an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Deborah Farrington ’72

Venture capitalist, entrepreneur

Deborah Farrington is co-founder and managing partner of New York City-based Starvest Partners, one of the largest majority women–owned venture capital firms in the United States. Farrington’s interest in business and finance was instilled at an early age, thanks to regular visits to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange with her father, who worked in the financial services industry. Throughout her long career, Farrington has been a major player in a field where fewer than 10% of partners in venture capital firms are women. In 2000, she led a $20 million round of investments in a then little-known company called NetSuite. Seven years later, she made headlines when the company went public at a value of $1.8 billion, scoring the second-largest public offering of a tech company since Google. She has since been called Wall Street’s “top female technology deal maker” and a “venture capitalist with the golden touch.” She has also appeared numerous times on Forbes magazine’s Midas 100 list of top venture capitalists, securing the top spot in 2008 and 2011. In 2018, she was awarded The Foreign Policy Association Centennial Medal for Achievement in Financial Services. As one of only a few prominent women venture capitalists, Farrington is deeply committed to mentoring and providing opportunities to other women interested in pursuing careers in business and finance. She has shared her expertise on the boards of various organizations, including the International Women’s Forum, the American Friends of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and Opportunity International, which provides microloans to women in Africa and Central America. For Smith, Farrington has served on the board of trustees and as a judge for the college’s Draper Competition for Collegiate Women Entrepreneurs. She has also worked directly with students, helping them develop their own business plans. Farrington, who studied economics at Smith, holds an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Deborah Farrington

Iris González ’11

Engineer

Iris González is an engineer and health care advocate who is deeply dedicated to ensuring equitable and comprehensive care for society’s most vulnerable. As current chief operating officer of North America at IVI RMA Global, headquartered in Spain, González uses her skills to deliver world-class clinical outcomes for adults in their family planning journeys to achieve their dream of having a baby. As a student at Smith, González was part of a team that designed automation components of a microwave-based tissue processing system for use in point-of-service facilities, reducing both the time and cost of tissue processing. Now, González is using her experiences to mentor others and increase equity in both STEM and business. She is also the author of The Wedge Effect, which chronicles her own journey out of extreme socio-economic, financial, and cultural odds to become a successful entrepreneur and STEM leader. She has been recognized by the Miami Marlins Foundation as a Community Gamechanger, has been honored by the City of Boston as an “Outstanding Bostonian,” and is also a past Broward County Commission on the Status of Women Women’s History Month Honoree. Iris also serves as president at Improve Your Operations, delivering executive operation services to companies. González graduated from Smith with a degree in engineering and a minor in Africana studies.

Margaret Nyamumbo ’11

Entrepreneur

As the founder and CEO of Kahawa 1893, Margaret Nyamumbo is the first Black woman to own a nationally distributed coffee brand in the United States. Originally intending to study medicine at the University of Nairobi, Nyamumbo shifted gears and pursued economics instead, with the hope of one day launching her own business. Before making that happen, though, she worked for several years in investment banking, eventually accumulating enough savings to leave her job and pursue her dream of starting a business. Having grown up on a coffee farm in Kenya, Nyamumbo has long had an affinity for coffee. She often picked coffee berries with her mother and was intimately familiar with the ins and outs—as well as the good and the bad—of the coffee trade. In starting Kahawa 1893, Nyamumbo wanted to break down the inequalities in Kenya’s coffee supply chain by creating an ethical and inclusive company that would safeguard the needs and interests of coffee laborers and Kenyan women, who provide nearly 90% of the farm labor needed to harvest coffee. Today, nearly eight years since Kahawa 1893 coffee hit the market, the company has grown and evolved. Consumers, for example, can now offer tips to farmers that are then matched by Kahawa. Nyamumbo, who studied economics at Smith and also has an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, has been featured on the hit television series Shark Tank and has been recognized worldwide for her ethical business practices.

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Awards

Faculty Teaching Award

Given annually by the Student Government Association, the Faculty Teaching Award recognizes and rewards distinction in teaching and professors’ ability to connect to students, both in and outside of the classroom. The award was established more than 20 years ago as a way for students to thank educators for their support, encouragement and inspiration. Each year students are encouraged to submit nominations to the SGA Curriculum Committee through written and other creative forms of expression.

Elizabeth B. Wyandt Gavel Award

The Elizabeth B. Wyandt Gavel Award is given annually to Smith staff members “who have given extraordinarily of themselves to the Smith College community as a whole.” Established in 1984, the Wyandt Gavel Award is administered by the Student Government Association, which solicits nominations from students.

2024 Winners

Susan Voss

Achilles Professor of Engineering

2024 Faculty Teaching Award recipient

Martha Potyrala

Administrative Assistant, Dance

2024 Gavel Award recipient

Susanna Ferguson

Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies

2024 Faculty Teaching Award recipient

Julian Martineau

Interim Chef, Dawes House

2024 Gavel Award recipient

Rally Day History

The Smith College Medal has been awarded to outstanding alumnae at Rally Day since 1973. The medalists have become an important part of the program, speaking prior to convocation in classes and afterward in conversations with students.

The origins of Rally Day can be traced to a series of annual celebrations of George Washington’s birthday, the first of which was held at Smith College in February 1876. These celebrations evolved from social dinners or receptions into daylong college events. The addition of a “rally” to the day in 1894 was eventually reflected in the name Rally Day, first used in 1906. The celebration is still held annually in February but has evolved from a patriotic commemoration to a convocation.

Over the years, students have sponsored and participated in various activities: rallies, debates, basketball rivalries, dramatic presentations, singing and dancing (at first only square dancing was allowed; the waltz was introduced 20 years later).

The current tradition of sponsoring an event to benefit a charity began in 1918 when the Rally Day Show was held to raise funds for the Smith College Relief Unit serving in World War I France. It was not until 1943 that a woman—Denise H. Davey, vice chair of the Fighting French Relief Committee—was invited to speak at the commemoration exercises. For several years, the president has chosen Rally Day to announce the upcoming commencement speaker.

Dress at Rally Day has evolved as well. In 1944, the senior class began wearing its graduation caps and gowns to the convocation. The day still marks the first time the seniors publicly wear their gowns. In recent years, however, the caps have been replaced by inventive hats of the students’ choosing (and sometimes of their own making), in keeping with the “rallying” and spirited nature of the day.