This article employs the emerging theoretical framework of values-engaged assessment to develop a narrative analyzing recent efforts to expand and formalize opportunities for graduate students to participate in community-engaged teaching and research at UCLA. After establishing the historical and institutional background for a new graduate seminar on engaged pedagogy and public scholarship, the article presents reflections from five graduate student contributors. The author's voice serves to weave these student stories into a larger conversation analyzing the opportunities and challenges involved in advancing engaged graduate education at large research universities. The research team's collaborative narrative demonstrates that engaged graduate students continue to face significant challenges; but our story also shows that when research universities begin to position graduate student civic professional development as central to the public mission of higher education, this shift in values creates new opportunities to reimagine what it means--and what it takes--for research universities to serve the public good in the twenty-first century.