For someone who understands the importance of commemorating milestones, I am surprisingly impatient when it comes to graduation ceremonies in general and graduation speakers in particular. I have yet to hear a speech that is interesting and/or unique enough to warrant the extra 20 minutes I must wait until the speech is over and I get to cheer for the graduates walking across the stage to receive their diplomas.
To me, graduations are like eating hard-shell crabs: there’s great anticipation and a lot of delayed gratification (digging out the meat, not to mention the inevitable cuts which sting from the seasoning) for that one special moment – a chance to eat a succulent (albeit puny) piece of crab. Just not worth it, I tell you!
However, one speech that caught my attention was the recent commencement address given by Frank Warren at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. Warren, the founder of PostSecret.com, an “ongoing art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard,” invited graduates to submit one-sentence commencement speeches in advance. Warren selected a few to share with the audience on graduation day and then, he posted the rest on his site and encouraged readers’ submissions.
One-sentence commencement speech? Now THAT’S my kind of speech! Some of my favorites:
“You can do anything. But not everything.”
“Going out into the “real world” is a scary concept until it hits you (and it will!) that you are already living in the real world and always have been.”
“It’s better to be pissed-off than pissed-on.”
“Your GPA doesn’t matter.”
“Let somebody love you.”
Wise Women, what stands out in your memory from a graduation exercise – yours or somebody else’s?
5-19-2009 08:08:07
When I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, our commencement speaker was Sam Donaldson. All of us budding journalists, convinced we were going to set the publishing world on fire, were looking for some advice from Sam Donaldson — that one tidbit that would help us be as successful in journalism as he was. And what did he share with us? Something he’d learned from Conrad Hilton (Hilton’s “one bit of sage advice”) — always put the shower curtain inside the tub when you’re taking a shower.
It may not have been the advice we were looking for, but I still remember it today and practice it on a daily basis. Not so sure I would have been able to say the same for a journalism tidbit, had Sam given us one.
5-19-2009 08:27:30
Former First Lady Barbara Bush as speaker at Wellesley in 1990, I graduated from another school long before this but recalled reading this excerpt and it’s stuck with me since…
“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent.”
5-21-2009 22:10:58
I remember my graduation distinctly. Indirha Gandhi was supposed to give the commencement address – but just a few short months before, she was assasinated. Sandra Day O’Connor spoke instead. But the most memorable speaker, a woman who received an honorary degree, was Grace Murray Hopper. She was a very short lady, dressed in uniform, as she was a Rear Admiral. (From a distance, she almost looked like Granny from the Beverly Hill Billies). She was an impressive woman – graduating from Vassar in 1929, and ended up with a PHD in mathematics from Yale in 1934. She was a software pioneer, and is widely recognized as the “mother” of the Cobol language. She told us:
“just do it. It’s much easier to say your sorry than ask permission.” I’ve always credited her with that line – although since I’ve heard it a few times since, I’m not sure who the ultimate originator of the line is. The one thing I do know, it that it makes a heck of a lot of sense and I’ve followed that advice quite a few times!