REBECCA JARVIS: OK, class of 2019.
How are we feeling?
[APPLAUSE]
Well, congratulations to all of you.
I have some good news and some bad news today.
The bad news is that I'm not here
to pay off your student loans.
Sorry about that.
But the good news is that I'm confident at least one of you
out there today will be able to make good
on that class gift in the not too distant future.
Thank you, Dean Boyer.
Thank you, Dean Allison, for the invitation to speak today.
And thank you so much, students, for having me here to share
in your class day celebrations.
It's really an honor, truly an honor,
to be here with all of you.
As Sophia mentioned, I graduated from the University of Chicago
in 2003 after studying law, letters,
and society and economics.
This campus is where I had some of the greatest debates
and arguments of my life.
It's where my own assumptions and views were challenged
every single day, where I learned how not what to think,
truly one of the greatest gifts of a U Chicago education.
It's also where I met my husband and where I made
a number of lifelong friends.
But 16 years ago sitting where you are,
I still had so many questions.
I was free.
And I wanted to do big things.
But exactly how would I do those big things?
So I come here today with five hopefully valuable lessons,
some more hard-won than others, that I've learned
on my post-U Chicago journey.
Lesson one, not all good advice is actually good for you.
I cover business technology and economics
as a correspondent at ABC News.
And I have a podcast called No Limits
where I interview trailblazing women
about their careers and the choices
that they've made along the way.
And I close every conversation with the question,
what's the worst advice you've ever received?
Typically, that bad advice comes from one of three places.
First, someone who's trying to sabotage you, or maybe it's
someone who doesn't understand you,
or finally, it's coming from someone who loves you.
And why would someone who loves you give you bad advice?
Because they are desperately trying to protect you.
Here's what's interesting.
Most of my guests got the worst advice of their lives
from a person who cared about them the most.
For me, that bad advice wrapped in good intentions
came a year and a half into my first job out of college.
Like a lot of you probably will be doing,
I went into investment banking.
[LAUGHTER]
Got a laugh, nice.
I graduated deep in student loan debt.
The job paid extremely well.
And I admittedly wanted to be a master of the universe.
But guess what?
Cover your ears if you're about to become an investment banking
analyst.
From day one, I was miserable, absolutely miserable.
I worked around the clock.
I never saw my friends.
I made tons of mistakes and got yelled at all the time.
Prepare yourselves.
I spent countless hours a day analyzing data
on such scintillating topics as regional trends
in yogurt consumption.
That's real.
I'd often sit at my desk and dream
about what it might take to get a minor but severe
enough injury to put me in the hospital for a while
so I wouldn't have to go to work.
I wasn't just unhappy, I was hungry for something
different--
journalism.
I'd written for the Maroon and was editor-in-chief
of my high school newspaper.
My mom's a journalist.
My grandfather was a journalist.
And I didn't know it yet, but my future husband,
who was also a student here at the University of Chicago,
had been a copy editor at the now defunct Chicago Weekly
News.
All signs pointed me to journalism.
Except when I told my parents and a lot of family friends
that I wanted to quit to become a reporter,
they were horrified.
Everyone I trusted and loved advised me not
to leave the security of investment banking.
This was 2005 when a career in banking looked like a safe bet
before the financial crisis.
When I ultimately made the decision to quit,
I was petrified but also exhilarated.
No more yogurt analysis.
I told myself I had two years to figure out journalism.
I'd saved up enough to pay off my student loans.
And worst case scenario, I'd go to school, go back to school,
or find another job.
When I gave my two weeks notice, most my colleagues looked at me
like I was headed for disaster.
And I wasn't sure they were wrong.
But the moment I left the building, I never looked back.
Yes, it took a while before others could
see I made the right call.
But today, as some of my greatest professional joys
are now because I went against the advice
of well-intentioned people back then.
So how did I ultimately become a journalist?
More on that in a moment.
But first, lesson two, the University of Chicago
is a little bit quirky, and so are you.
Embrace it.
I remember my first days in Hyde Park thinking
to myself of the student body, these people
are totally brilliant, totally fascinating, and totally weird.
I loved that about the University of Chicago.
But when I got into the working world among peers
with more traditional degrees in business and accounting,
I was admittedly intimidated.
We didn't have those professional degrees
as undergrads at the U of C. The same thing
happened again post-investment banking
when I began going after reporting jobs.
I'd spend day after day applying on websites
to roles that called for communications majors
and journalism experience.
They were two things I didn't really have.
45 rejections later, I realized I had to change my strategy.
I was burying my interests and my unique background
in business, constitutional law, and economics.
And I was wasting precious time trying
to play up the small amount of journalism experience I had.
It wasn't until I started leading
with what made me different from other candidates
that things began to click.
I started calling up business editors in Chicago
and asking them out for coffee.
I stopped worrying about the ones who didn't respond or told
me they didn't have the time and instead focused on those
who were willing to meet.
Our conversations were unstructured, but in the end,
I would always pitch them a few stories based on what
I'd seen in investment banking.
I'd share questions about things that I'd seen
that didn't seem to add up.
No, I didn't have a journalism degree.
What I had was curiosity, a desire to dig deeper,
a will to keep at it, and I had story ideas,
ideas they could print in tomorrow's paper
if they let me write them.
Suddenly, my unconventional background
became an asset rather than a deficit.
Crain's Chicago Business and a magazine
called Business 2.0 both took a chance
and let me begin writing for them.
No matter what your ultimate career goal,
you're bound at some point to come up against the doubters.
Your background might not fit the exact requirements
in the job description.
Remember who you are.
Remember what drove you to this quirky, special place called
the University of Chicago, what you learned here
through your mandatorily broad education.
You can talk about anything.
You have a foundation to attack any problem.
You may not have every answer.
But you absolutely know how to ask the right questions because
of U Chicago.
Use that gift.
Lesson three, you're going to feel like a loser.
For those of you who haven't seen my Wikipedia page,
I actually was a loser on national TV on a show called
The Apprentice.
I know this is the University of Chicago and all.
But I assume you've heard of it, at least at this point.
As a kid, I always said I wanted to be the president.
Little did I know I'd end up on a reality
show with our future president.
Shortly after The Apprentice aired,
I got a call from CNBC, the Business News Network.
They were intrigued by my background in journalism
and investment banking.
They offered me a six-month sink or swim deal.
I had half a year to prove myself or I'd be out the door.
This was my dream job.
All I wanted to do was live up to the expectations
of the people who'd taken a chance on me.
But the first thing I learned at CNBC
was that I was terrible at my job.
I mean, truly awful.
The minute I'd get in front of a camera,
my mind would go completely blank.
I couldn't move except for my shaking hands.
I could read a book but not the teleprompter.
My mouth would go completely dry.
Have you ever watched a seemingly endless story
about gas prices from a reporter with cotton mouth?
It was cringe-worthy.
And the time to prove myself was running out.
One day, my boss came by my desk with an assignment.
Martha Stewart had recently gotten out of prison.
She'd be at an event.
I should go yell a few questions at her on the red carpet
and ask her how it felt to be free.
OK, I thought to myself.
Shouting at a powerful person?
The University of Chicago prepared me perfectly
for this role.
Thankfully, I was also wearing my favorite turquoise power
suit.
Nice.
So I show up at the red carpet with my camera crew
ready to go.
And here's how it works.
Every news outlet gets a tiny spot.
You're basically shoulder to shoulder
with the person next to you.
And you're stuck.
You cannot move from this position.
You have a few seconds to make it count
as you shout those questions.
So I see Martha walking up to me.
She's calm, cool, and collected, perfection personified.
My adrenaline's flowing.
We lock eyes.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
Literally nothing comes out.
I stare at her open-mouthed like a total lunatic, crazy,
staring at her face, thinking only
of how angry my boss is going to be with me that I forgot
my one and only question I needed to ask her,
and two, for some reason thinking
about how to throw the perfect clambake on Cape Cod.
By the time I remember my words, M. Diddy,
that was apparently Martha's nickname in prison,
has moved on.
Now I am yelling at the back of her perfectly coiffed head,
how does it feel to be free, Martha?
No response.
In my desperation, I can think of no other option
than to break from my spot.
My job is on the line.
Microphone in hand, tripping over cords
and bumping into the reporter next
to me, I take off after Martha, repeating
my one and only question, how does it feel to be free?
Not only is she still completely ignoring me,
but as it turns out, I am now completely blocking her
from the cameras in my turquoise power suit.
Then come the angry roars.
Every reporter and crew whose shot I've ruined
starts yelling at me, yelling things
I can't repeat here today.
In the end, I get nothing.
And as I head back to the office,
I'm feeling, like I said in lesson three, like a loser.
I failed.
What will my boss say?
Well, he thought the whole thing was hilarious,
told everyone in the newsroom, which
made me feel like an even bigger loser.
In the end, it's not like he was happy I didn't get the story.
I might have made a fool of myself.
But he respected me for trying and gave me another shot.
And eventually, I did figure things out,
got to stay at CNBC, went on to CBS News,
and now am with ABC News.
I've had a front row seat to the great recession,
the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Bernie Madoff
trial, Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal,
and the rise of Amazon.
And in a career highlight, I was part of our election night 2016
coverage for ABC News and sat across and with some
of my journalist heroes, something I
dreamed of doing as a student here
at the University of Chicago watching the returns in 2000
from my dorm room at the Shoreland.
And let's be honest.
I still feel like a loser at times.
Everyone does.
But so what?
We're human.
We move on to greater things and better power suits.
Lesson four, ignore the end game.
You may not know where something's going to lead.
You may not even have a goal.
You might just be curious.
You should still do it.
Here's what I'm talking about.
A few years ago, I became obsessed with a story
about a woman named Elizabeth Holmes.
She dropped out of Stanford to start
a company called Theranos.
She said she wanted to change the world with a new type
of blood testing.
And for a moment, it looked like she might.
She was celebrated as the youngest
female self-made billionaire, the next Steve Jobs.
I was captivated.
But when I first pitched covering her in a podcast,
my bosses weren't quite as passionate.
Podcasts were a medium we hadn't fully explored yet at ABC News.
Plus, there was that big election, 2016.
And it was taking up all the oxygen in the room.
So I started pursuing the story of Elizabeth Holmes
and Theranos in the same way I took
a number of elective courses here
at the University of Chicago, purely because I
was fascinated by the material.
I'd do my daily reports for Good Morning America and World News
Tonight.
And on my own time, I'd dig a little deeper into Theranos.
For three years, my team and I worked mostly below the radar
with little attention paid to our pet project.
Then came the criminal fraud charges against Elizabeth.
She pleaded not guilty but was facing up to 20 years in prison
if convicted for misleading investors, doctors,
and the public about her technology.
Her $10 billion company became worthless overnight.
The media was suddenly very interested.
And so were my bosses.
Their indifference had transformed into an insatiable
appetite for more.
And my team and I had the whole thing ready to go,
more than 100 interviews, thousands of pages of never
before aired depositions with Elizabeth, her COO,
and many of the powerful board members
like former Secretary of State George Shultz and Wells Fargo
CEO Dick Kovacevich.
The podcast, which we called The Dropout,
surpassed all expectations.
It soared to number one on the Apple charts,
has more than 13 million downloads and counting,
and now Fox Searchlight is adapting it
into a Hulu original with Kate McKinnon from Saturday Night
Live playing Elizabeth Holmes.
Remember, all of this came from an idea I initially
couldn't get anyone in my office to listen to, an idea I wanted
to pursue mostly for the enjoyment of it.
It wasn't especially strategic.
But the work was extraordinarily fulfilling.
All the success, and I mean this sincerely,
is just icing on the cake.
As you carve your own path, don't
forget to do things for the simple joy of it.
And speaking of joy, there's a lot of it ahead.
But as someone who falls down the Instagram rabbit hole
from time to time, I think it's important to tell you likes
don't equal love, lesson five.
AUDIENCE: Woo!
REBECCA JARVIS: Someone liked it.
[LAUGHTER]
I read a stat a while ago about the average Facebook
user having 400 friends but just five people
they could really call on in an emergency.
Focus on your five.
I'm not saying we should ditch social media altogether.
I'll probably post about this day on Instagram later.
I'm just reminding you that consuming too many
of those empty social calories can
be as detrimental to your insides
as whatever habits you picked up during finals week.
The lesson isn't based on scientific evidence--
I'm sorry to be so un-U of C--
just my own field observations.
You're welcome, anthropology majors.
For all the hashtag wisdom that exists
in the palm of your hand, don't forget what
you learned here the hard way.
Remember the friendships, the late night
debates in your dorm room, and the French toast at Salonica.
You had to be present to enjoy all of that.
The surface of the earth is nearly 200 million
square miles.
Don't confine your life to a six inch screen.
And finally, remember the ticket you now
have in your pocket, your University of Chicago
education, the most precious and valuable gift that you have
paid for with your time and energy
and potentially a couple thousand IOUs to the bank.
This gift will truly take you anywhere if you let it.
Now is your time.
You must go.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]