This year's graduation was moderated by Carnegie Mellon's Provost, Dr. Mark Kamlet (a former Dean of the Heinz College), and featured Alan Noble, the Engineering Director for Google Australia and a Heinz College Australia Advisory Board member, as the keynote speaker.
In my role as Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon Australia, I get to give the "Charge to the Graduates" at the end of the ceremony, which is kind of a gentle shove out the door, a verbal line of demarcation between life as a graduate student and the challenges of the "real world".
Here are my remarks from a remarkable day:
First of all, I’d like to add my congratulations to all of our graduates and, in particular, the trailblazers that make up our first graduating class of part-time students. As someone who got two graduate degrees while trying to hold down a job, have a life, and keep my wife from forgetting what I looked like, I know how challenging this journey has been for all of you. Make sure that you take at least a few minutes to take great pride in your accomplishments.
And that brings me to my Charge to the Graduates.
I was pretty proud to get accepted into Carnegie Mellon as an undergraduate in the early 1980’s, although I probably didn’t understand how significant it was at the time. I was a pretty good student but I have to admit that my primary focus in high school was sports and girls, not always in that order.
My life changed forever about halfway through my first day of orientation as a freshman. I was sitting between two guys in a packed lecture hall. On my left was a guy who had worked at an IBM research lab over the summer. On my right was a guy proudly talking about the computer he had just built from scratch, from soldering the circuit boards to writing the operating system. As I glanced down a couple of rows, I noticed another incoming student, obviously from somewhere outside the US, working on page-wide equations located on the back cover of our new calculus book.
As a computer science major that had taken one programming class in high school and got a ‘B’, I was clearly in a new land. Unfortunately, it was a land where I had the wrong kind of passport, didn’t speak the language, and the natives seemed hostile.
I learned something pretty important in that moment—my success or failure would be directly connected to how much I was willing to change and how hard I was willing to work. It was also reminded me that having a good dose of humility is a pretty desirable character trait.
I’ve had lots of challenges in my academic and professional life since then but getting through Carnegie Mellon is still the toughest thing I’ve ever done. Ever though I eventually graduated from CMU as a University Scholar, I was so happy that my time at Carnegie Mellon was over, and so intent to put that difficult period in my life behind me, that I chose not to stay in touch with the university for nearly a decade.
So I hope that our graduates, this year and every year, enter the world with what I’ll call a “confident humility”. That while they take great pride in the accomplishments that we recognize today, they balance that confidence with a recognition that they have stood on the shoulders of giants—friends, family, classmates, and colleagues—to get this far and that they’ll need other shoulders—to stand on, depend on, and occasionally cry on—to make their difference in the world.
Congratulations again to our graduates. All of us at the Heinz College hope that you won’t be as foolish as I was and let ten years go by before you let us know what you’re up to. You’re now officially part of the Carnegie Mellon family and, like the family and friends that are with you here today, we’ll be cheering you on every step of the way.
Thank You.
Photos courtesy of Roy VanDerVegt www.royvphotography.com.au
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