Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MIT President Sally Kornbluth Charge to the Class of 2023”.
Okay, so Anna and AJ, thank you both for your remarks and for your leadership of wisdom from Show Business, Never follow an act with kids or animals or, as we’ve just seen with Mark Rober or drone. Nobody told me I could have music in the background. Um and since Anna and AJ Rose to the challenge, I will give it my best shot as well. Technically as president, it’s my role to deliver the charge to the graduates, and I will do that in a moment. But I want to begin by offering our new graduates a few words of admiration and thanks.
There are quite a few brass rats out in the world, let’s say more than 145 000 and every one of them represents the remarkable feat of self-discipline and perseverance. It takes to earn an MIT degree, but the brass rats that were just turned by today’s graduates will always have a special luster, because all of you graduating today did more than tame your chosen discipline. You also completed an involuntary double major in applied pandemic studies. You learned you created you explored in ways that no one had ever MIT has ever done all while caring for your friends, your families and yourselves through the long struggle that none of us were prepared for now, I’m sure sure we’re glad to have that years-long exam Behind us, but I want to acknowledge, on behalf of the faculty that we honor all that you achieved just like an Olympic athlete who wants to get that perfect 10 having taken on this added degree of difficulty, and what I learned from colleagues here is that you Did more than hold things together for the people close to you in an important sense? You you also held together MIT how, across thousands of miles and endless endless hours of Zoom, we kept the cultures, the traditions and the values of the MIT alive and thriving as if it were that you know precious jar of sourdough starter, passed On to the Next Generation, I’ve inherited is kind finder, wiser, nimbler and more playful. You made sure that the MIT Spirit, the spirit that Drew you here would endure, and you found ways to make it even better, and for that I cannot. Thank you enough.
So since I’m a bit of a newcomer, I can probably over the unwelcome news that, given those brass Rats, the world will expect a great deal from you. I don’t even have one yeah from the minute. I accepted this new position. People have been saying things to me like um, so you folks from MIT are going to save us on climate right right and you know with such Stellar students and faculty and graduates.
If anyone can do it, we can and we sure are going to try. Of course, the world has always expected a lot from MIT graduates, and I think our friends out there in The Red Jackets would agree with that. As ever, people will expect you to be analytical and practical and fearless and brilliant, and now also whatever your field and no matter how you did it on the girs. People will expect you to understand everything from nuclear fusion, to cryptocurrency, to synthetic biology, to artificial intelligence and to be able to explain them like an expert and by the way to guard us from all the attendant dangers.
And I believe that you can do and more. But while the world, and possibly your parents, may be expecting big things from you right away, I want to give you permission for a while to not know and to try different paths and to change your mind, especially in this world, with new Industries, new disciplines, new Jobs emerging on every Frontier Mark Rober just described to you crossing the river one wobbly stone at a time and for me, and probably for many in the audience, who are also maybe a couple decades past graduation hearing Mark talk about changing course. Midstream brought a sudden memory of being metaphorically soaking wet like that time.
I lobbied really really hard to get a vice Provost job with big new administrative duties, which I thought would be a crucial step in my career and the University made a big announcement and though not only then did I realize that I was really wrong for the Job and it was wrong for me and then I had to tell the president that I couldn’t take it after all, and that was a big splash, but not the kind you all want to make, or even the time I had to explain to my parents that, Although I had just earned my bachelor’s degree in political science, the way we’d always discussed now, I’d received a scholarship to go on a whole new bachelor’s degree in biology. They were not unsupportive, but they were really deeply puzzled. There’D never been an academic in my family.
Now, with both of these mid-stream course corrections, I definitely got a little wet. It was kind of awkward at the time, but you know the world did not come to an end and if I hadn’t changed my mind and taken an alternative route, I probably would not have found my way to this audience today. So now it’s time for me to deliver your charge, so I always think the word charge sounds like some kind of grand assignment, which sounds suspiciously like some farewell problem sex. That sounds like a good idea right. Okay, I didn’t think so either. So I want to give you a different kind of charge, a charge as in a source of energy.
You know: we’ve all seen that little warning box in the corner of the screen, your laptop, will sleep soon if it is not plugged into a power source. Every student here has felt that same sensation, deep down and personally and often without the option, to sleep soon, what’s more, even without an MIT curriculum to test our limits. We all live, surrounded by devices and media and societal forces that tend to drain our batteries and dissipate our energy and our attention, which means that for each one of us it has never been more important to cultivate our personal sources of renewable energy. You can name your own sources, I’m sure, but in my life, beyond the company of the people, I love and those many hours spent watching British mysteries about small rural towns that have inexplicably high crime rates.
I found two infinitely renewable sources of energy curiosity and a sense of larger purpose. Frankly, the prominence of these two factors in my life in the life of this community are a key part of what drew me to MIT. This place runs on curiosity and Duncan and it never runs dry there’s a moment. I will never forget from graduate school that tells the exact same story.
Some of you may have heard it because I’ve told it in other places, but I believe it Bears repeating. So we had this arrangement in graduate school where each one of us had a desk that was face to face with another student’s desk but separated by a high sorry keep hitting that a high partition. You could talk, you could hear across it, but you couldn’t actually see the student on the other side of that partition and one day, I’m sitting at my desk and I heard a loud shout and an expletive which I will not repeat, but in a good way. If you know what I mean, which I’m sure was accompanied by a fist pump, though I couldn’t see it sitting in his company, my fellow graduate student had been staring at the DNA sequence of the new cancer-causing Gene that he had discovered and he suddenly realized that That missing piece of DNA sequence, which he thought was an artifact or an error, was actually an indication that he found a whole new class of cancer-causing genes.
It opened the way not only to his PhD thesis but to his entire career, still works on and is considered a World expert in that class of genes, and I am quite sure he would tell you that it was one of the most exciting moments of his Life and the Curiosity that has led him there has renewed itself over and over powering his own work and inspiring those around him ever since so curiosity is endlessly electrifying and best of all, you can find a way to harness your curiosity to a purpose larger than Yourself, one of the greatest joys in life is the feeling of using your skills to the limit to do something important for others, your community, your discipline, your institution, your country, in the whole Human family and our fragile planet. If you can do that, you will find a free Wireless charge wherever you go, so I wish you all the warmest congratulations on all that you’ve achieved and I cannot wait to see where your curiosity and sense of purpose lead you next. Thank you, foreign [ Applause.
], thank you for those inspiring words president kornbliss and also .