Commencement speech to the Class of 2016
I love graduations.
If given a choice between going to someone’s graduation or to someone’s wedding, I will choose the former any day. The degrees conferred at graduations are forever. People always keep their education; they keep their spouses less often.
When I was preparing for my own college graduation from University of California, Berkeley in 2001, I desperately wanted to give the department commencement speech. I was a finalist. I ended up faxing my rejected written speech to the San Francisco Chronicle’s submission hotline and they published it as an editorial on the day I graduated.
I also love commencement speeches. Around this time of year, I browse YouTube to check out newly recorded speeches. The kind of inspiration shared in commencement speeches never gets old or cliched.
Five years ago, I got to fulfill my dream of giving a commencement speech, this time for the Asian Studies department at the University of Oregon, where Dr. Tuong Vu, my friend and fellow student at Berkeley, was the chair of the department and he invited me. Live graduations seem so much more precious now since most were cancelled last year. I dug up my speech I gave in 2016 and found that the message was still relevant and also a time capsule of where I was in life.
Here is the original speech:
Congratulations, Graduates of the Class of 2016.
Before I start, I want to ask everyone to take a deep breath of air.
That is the exhale of relief. You made it.
Class of 2016, savor this day because there is no other day like graduation day. The only way one graduates is by earning it. Savor this feeling of anticipation, excitement, hope tinged with just a bit of sadness.
Are you ready for the next stage in your life? What will it look like?
I want you to take a moment to imagine what success looks like for you after you graduate today. Close your eyes, and fill in this sentence, “Success means….” (wait 5 seconds)
I’m here to tell you whatever you imagined may not end up being the success you experience. That was definitely true for me.
15 years, I sat where you are sitting. I was in the Class of 2001, UC Berkeley, Department of History, which is where I met your Department Chair, Professor Tuong Vu, when he was a grad student. I was about to pursue my PhD in Southeast Asian history at the University of Cambridge on a full scholarship and I was on top of the world.
I imagined success to look like a PhD, a professorship, marriage, two kids, a big house and my photograph on the back of history books at Barnes and Nobles (this was before everyone bought their books from Amazon).
Boy, was I wrong.
The only thing that came true for me was getting my PhD.
And I worked hard to get that degree. I also had a lot of fun doing it. I studied in Cambridge. I was in love in Munich, ate my way through Paris, discovered myself in Saigon and Hanoi. I was proud of myself--this Seattle girl who had used her passport for the first time when I moved to the Uk and who had become a sophisticated citizen of the world. But as I was preparing to defend my dissertation, I became filled with dread. I looked inside and realized, I don’t want this life. I didn’t want to become an academic. I was good at research, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be good at anything else. I thought I was living success as I had imagined it to be, but how could I call it success if it’s not what I really wanted and even worse, I didn’t even know what I really wanted?
At the same time, my younger brother asked me to return home to Seattle to help run the Vietnamese language newspaper my family owned. I said goodbye to academia, hello to business, and I returned home in 2008, the start of the recession and of print newspapers shutting down across the country. I went from not living in one city for more than 15 months to settling down in the neighborhood that had been home to the newspaper for decades.. I went from spending my days in dusty archives in the south of France reading about long gone Vietnamese communist revolutions to spending my days visiting small businesses, churches and temples in south Seattle covering the lives of an anti-communist Vietnamese refugee community. I went from writing history to being a community activist. I was still using my research, writing, and story-telling skills I developed as a scholar of Asia but for totally different purposes.
Every day was a financial struggle. Ultimately, no matter how hard we worked, we had to close down half the newspaper so that the other half could survive. Some might call that a failure. I called it a success, just not the way we had expected. Success looked like learning how to motivate a staff, selling and serving customers, and engaging diverse communities.
After 3 years of running the newspaper, I realized I was going to have to move to a bigger org to continue learning. I was working with 8 people, half of whom had the same last name as me. So, I landed a job at Microsoft. I went from leading a small, scrappy, nimble fast moving team to being a glorified cat herder in charge of email triage in a huge bureaucracy. I made more money in two months at Microsoft than I had in a year at the newspaper. Department cuts led to a lay off.
I found my way to another software company, where I was hired to do online marketing, something I knew nothing about. After three months, I was heading marketing for the entire company. But the company had to downsize and I was out of a job again. This time when I was laid off, I waited until a job found me. I was recruited to head community engagement and marketing at a trade association that advocates on behalf of Washington’s tech industry. I now push to help get underrepresented communities opportunities to work in the tech sector. Success looks like getting paid to do the work you were volunteering to do all along.
It took me 8 years to get my PhD. In the 8 years since, I have gone from working in a dying industry in crisis to the world’s fastest growing industry. I have been at 3 companies and 1 non-profit. I have weathered two lay-offs.
I also never got married, I don’t have kids, I live alone in a 400 sq foot studio in Seattle’s Chinatown and instead of writing history books, I blog for Forbes.com. And I’m really happy.
It wasn’t until I intentionally stepped on this path toward success that I had envisioned for myself did I discover success looks like the joy of the journey itself. And success is also a destination, but you will have many different destinations. So, I have some travel tips for your journey:
1) Learn by Doing. People often ask me, how did I land jobs in an industry and in a function I had no training in? After I finished my dissertation, I realized I wanted to go into business but I didn’t want to go back to school and that I could get my real life MBA by running a small business. So, I encourage you to learn by doing. Don’t let the lack of formal academic training hold you back from stretching your skills. When my brother and I had to apply for a business loan, we had to submit a business plan. I had no idea how to write one, but I Googled it and found a template, sought advice from business mentors, and wrote a plan that landed us a much needed loan. Your academic training in Asian Studies gave you the tool to think critically and problem solve and you can continue to apply that to anything you.
2) Engage in Strategic volunteering. By this, I don’t mean one-off volunteering gigs like working at the soup kitchen over Thanksgiving. A lot of people like to think that when you volunteer, you are giving. But I urge you to find volunteer opportunities where you are also getting something in return. Remember this--to give is to get and to get is to give. This is the motion you make when you are giving something. This is the motion you make when you are getting something. It’s the same motion. You should be getting something in return for your time. Consider using volunteering to take risks that you can’t take at work, to build new skills, and to expand your network. Volunteers almost never get fired. I supplemented my real life MBA at the newspaper through volunteering. All the jobs I’ve gotten in the tech industry have been because people I volunteered with referred me.
3) Don’t hate. Everyone has a different journey and different destinations and their own success. Don’t compare yourself to others. In school, there’s a ‘top of the class’ mentality. But in the real world, there are so many cool people doing interesting things and living their success stories and there’s a lot of joy in cheering them on. I’ve come to accept there will always be people younger, smarter, more charming, and better looking than me. I’m looking at a room full of them right now. Befriend those people, now, and help them now. People I have helped early in their careers are now helping me and the same is true for those who helped me earlier on--I am now helping them.
4) Harness your fears and doubts. After I returned home with my bright, shiny Cambridge PhD, I was earning below the poverty line and I had the burden of making payroll every month. I was ashamed to hang out with my friends with their fat, corporate jobs because I often couldn’t afford to go out to fancy bars. We all hit tough times. My favorite spoken word poet, Sarah Kaye, reminds me: “Getting the wind knocked out of you, only reminds your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s swept away.” Success looks like the resilience you need to keep picking yourself up again after you fall.
All of this is to say, you will find success in the process of finding success. And it will not always look like what you imagined or come when you want it to. You may only recognize it as success after it has long passed. Sometimes you have to redefine failure as success.
At the beginning of this speech, I asked you to imagine what success looks like after you graduate today. What did you imagine? Was it that cool job in Asia? That prestigious fellowship? A teaching post? Whatever it was, take some time later on this week to write it down in your journal so that you can revisit it years from now. Reading it will remind you of your younger you.
Looking back on my younger me helps me appreciate how far I’ve come and affirms I still have a long ways to go. I’ll tell you a little secret. I still don’t know what success will look like next. There are many things I don’t know. But there is one thing I know is true.
Graduates of the Asian studies department, I don’t have to wish you success because I know you will be successful in the pursuit of finding success. You have already proven yourself to be unconventional adventurers. Instead of pursuing degrees that will lead to lucrative careers, you have found delight in exploring topics like the New Asian Masculinity, the One-Child Policy in China, and the Sino-Japanese relations around the Yu-su-ku-ni Shrine.
Savor this day. There is so much beauty in not knowing what is ahead and all the different ways you’ll discover success. I wish you safe travels, Class of 2016.