I now call upon Meredith Vieira
to deliver the 142nd Commencement address
of Boston University.
Members of the Class of 2015, parents, President Brown,
trustees, honored guests, faculty, friends...
How cool is this?! This is pretty cool, right?! I only wish there had been
gin in my bottle instead of water, but hey...
And I know what was in yours! Alright...
I find it so fitting that Boston University started out as a school of
theology because today parents are saying,
"Thank you, God! We thought this day might never come."
After years of hard work and sacrifice
they sit here behind you clutching their tissues
while beaming with pride, and all they want in return is a simple hug
and "I love you, Mom, Dad. Thanks."
My youngest, Lily, graduates from Northwestern in a few weeks
and that's all I want. So this is a good day to show your parents how much you
really appreciate them
and hit them up for a loan while they're still vulnerable.
Do that. It'll work
I didn't attend BU, but I believe my presence here today
is kismet. Let me explain. Last February, after six long years and one Blizzard delay,
the Terriers took back what is rightfully theirs: the Bean Pot.
Alright, here's the kismet part. When my mother was a little girl, she had a
Boston Terrier named "Beans."
When I was a little girl, I was forced to eat franks and beans
every Saturday and they made me sick to my stomach,
which is exactly how I feel right now. Kismet. You see, I don't normally give
speeches, especially ones which require
offering advice and inspiration. I'm more your mother
than I am Mother Teresa. Just the thought of standing up here gave me such
agita that I originally said no. But the person asking me was my dear friend
and illustrious BU grad, Andy Lack, the new Chairman of
NBC News and MSNBC.
So in the end, I couldn't resist.
And by the way, I fully intend to remind him of this in a few months
when my contract comes up for renewal because at sixty-one, I need the job security.
So here I stand a nervous wreck,
worried I'll say the wrong thing, you're going to end up years from now drowning
your sorrows at Tavern in the Square...
...wondering, "Where'd we go wrong? Oh yeah, it all started with that damn commencement speech."
Or perhaps even more humiliating, you won't remember the speech at all,
much less who gave it. But that's the future,
this is now, and if I'm nervous, maybe you are, too.
Maybe you're anxious about what comes next, feeling the pressure to have all the
answers,
to get it right right out of the box. Listen,
you do not know what's about to hit you. And that's the great thing about life.
How boring with the journey be if you already knew for sure the final
destination?
Listen, you're Terriers. When terriers go for a car ride, they don't know where they're
going. They don't care where they're going.
They stick their head out the window, they let the wind rush over them,
and they enjoy the ride.
That's faith. Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole
staircase.
I never intended to become a broadcaster. It wasn't even on my radar screen.
When I was a senior in college, I was a lost English major.
I think that's the same thing, right? Um, really didn't know what I was going to do.
My mother had actually sent me to secretarial school, Katie Gibbs, the summer before
because she said you're not coming home
no matter what. But I took a course my senior year, January,
in radio broadcasting a few months before graduation.
A visiting professor from CBS News after hearing my voice on tape
pulled me aside, and to my utter disbelief, told me I had a future
in broadcast journalism, and offered me an internship
at WEEI when it used to be an all news radio station.
For whatever reason, mostly because no one ever told me that
I would amount to anything basically, I said,
"Yeah, okay." I took the first step, albeit blindly,
and it put me on the path to where I am today.
So if you haven't found a job or decided on a career path yet,
don't freak out. Don't let fear or frustration,
or the fact that others around you seem to be all set
immobilize you. But do, from this day forward,
open yourself up possibilities you might never have considered.
Step up. Step out of your comfort zone. Consider saying "yes"
even when "no" feels much safer. I'm not suggesting that it's going to be easy.
Your journey forward comes with some built-in stumbling blocks.
When that radio internship ended, the News Director kept me on as his secretary--
thank you, Katherine Gibbs--for a few months while I tried to figure out my
next move.
A short stint reading news headlines at a top 40 station in Worcester
made me question what I was doing and why.
And then came the offer to be a weekend television reporter at WJAR in
Providence, Rhode Island,
my hometown. It didn't matter that I had no on-air experience.
It was 1976 and I filled
a quota. Women and African-Americans were suddenly
in hot demand. That is, until we were hired
and then almost no one rooted for us to succeed.
I learned pretty quickly that the only way to gain respect
would be to out work everyone else,
to actually earn what I felt I was entitled to.
That ethic has served me well and I highly recommend it.
The fact is, your generation also has
and entitlement problem. Fairly or not, a large number of businesses
don't want to hire you because they perceive you to be self-entitled,
lazy, high maintenance, and disloyal. As a mother of three twenty-somethings and
host a show where 30% of the staff
are millennials, I know thats bull.
I have met some kids who are full of themselves, but numbskulls
span all generations, trust me. Most of the young people I know are incredibly
hard-working
and extremely motivated. As for loyalty,
it's a two-way street. Used to be you worked for a company for fifty years before
retiring with the send-off dinner and a fancy gold watch.
Somewhere along the way, employers began to see their employees
as replaceable widgets. Maybe you've seen it happen to your mom or dad.
Maybe you seen them struggle to balance home life with an inflexible
work environment. Maybe you want something more,
and I don't blame you. Companies can't expect your loyalty
unless they inspire it. [Applause]
However, you're not off the hook.
There is still no substitute for hard work and humility,
and if you want to get your foot in the door, it helps to get your fingers off the
smartphones, look people in the eye,
engage. You want people to actually like you and not just give you "likes."
Ultimately... those are the parents applauding...
Ultimately, your future is in the hands humans,
not electronic devices. Unless of course, people like Stephen Hawking,
Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniack are right about artificial intelligence,
in which case we'll all end up family pets to some android.
As for you graduates who already know what you're doing next, who have it all mapped out,
don't be so sure. Life is famous for throwing curveballs when you least
expect them.
My first big one came on a Friday afternoon.
After about a year at WJAR, I decided, "You know what?
Journalist might really be for me." I was happily typing up a story when my News
Director called me into his office,
told me I didn't have what it takes, and fired me.
I drove to my family's home, flung myself dramatically across my bed,
and sobbed. And that's how my dad found me.
When I explained what had happened, he asked me one question:
"Do you think you have what it takes?" I said,
"Yes," to which he replied, "Then it doesn't matter what
anyone else says. There will always be people putting you down,
always be people rooting for you to fail." The following Monday I went back to work
and I confronted that little weasel, I mean, my News Director,
and I told him I plan to succeed no matter what he thought.
I may have also pinned him up against the wall--like I said, he was little.
But he gave me my job back on the spot, and that's great that he did, but that's
not the point in the story.
The point is, you have to believe in yourself or no one else will.
In order to swim, you have to drown out
the naysayers. You're all smart, right? Or you wouldn't be here today.
I imagine you all strive for success and will undoubtedly find it.
But when you do, you just may discover does nothing to do with how much money
you make,
how big a house to live in, or how prestigious your job might sound
to someone else. I thought I'd found success
in 1989 when after several years in the business I arrived at 60 Minutes.
I just had our first son Ben and this was the only job I'd ever truly coveted.
I quickly became the media's poster woman for having it all.
Except for one thing, the only thing I had was a constant knot
in my stomach. When I was traveling the world covering stories, I literally
ached for my child. When I was home, I felt guilty
not hanging around the corridors of CBS and chatting up my boss
Don Hewitt. Eventually something had to give.
I became pregnant with our second son Gabe, and Don and I immediately butted
heads
over which baby should take precedence. His baby, 60 Minutes,
on mine? I remember sitting across from him when I suddenly had a flashback.
Several years earlier while still single and working my way up the ladder,
I had grabbed drinks with a seasoned and respected female producer.
After probably one too many, she confided in me that her biggest regret
was never marrying or having children. Something she could not
admit publicly. It just wouldn't look good, but she had given everything for her job
including herself. Flash forward,
Don probably thought I'd had one too many when I abruptly ended our heated
conversation.
I believe the words I uttered as I walked out the door were,
"I'm outta here." Not very mature, but that night
I slept like a baby as the knot in my stomach unraveled.
The fallout was fast incoming. On the one side, I had people, mostly women,
who were furious with me for destroying their dream of having it all.
For setting back the cause of feminism. On the other side were those who called me
brave for taking a stand for motherhood.
In fact, neither entered my thinking when I quit.
I left because it was the right decision for me and me alone.
[Applause]
There's a reason I've always loved Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken,"
because I think he was onto something. Following the road less traveled
really does mean making all the difference. Heck, I'm still forging my own
way
trying to balance work and family. Throughout your life,
you'll have to set your own priorities, make your own decisions,
and they won't always be the best or the brightest ones, but that's how you learn
and come to understand who you really are and what matters to you.
I have to tell you, I've known plenty of people who have
sacrificed their values for instant gratification.
Do that enough, and you will lose yourself. Only authenticity will keep your head on
straight
and your feet firmly planted, so don't strive for somebody else's notion of
perfection.
It's an unattainable and ultimately ridiculous
goal. Strive instead to be uniquely yourself.
And when in doubt, listen to your gut because it already knows
what you want to become. We are so condition, all of us, to think in terms of
the big job, the big salary,
in the case of journalism, the big scoop, that we sometimes forget
to see the big picture. That came into focus for me on the campus of another college,
Virginia Tech, just days after the tragic shooting there in 2007.
A co-host of the Today Show at the time, I was part of the team sent
to cover the story. It was during a campus candlelight vigil for the 32
victims
when a young coed in tears approached me an asked if
I would hold her. She was scared and she needed a parent's embrace because
her family was so far from Virginia Tech at that point,
and I had come into your home every morning, I was the closest thing
available to her in that moment. As it turned out we held each other
and we cried together and it was an incredibly humbling experience for me
because I realized
what it means to be a journalist. It's not about the big scoop.
It's about giving people a voice,
connecting with human beings, and caring about somebody other than yourself.
I think I'm preaching to the choir here
I think I am preaching to the choir here
because in the past four years we've all learned a great deal about perspective,
both in and outside the classroom. You lost 10 fellow students in one
calendar year. That's not supposed to happen. It goes against the natural
order things. It's never easy to face the fragility of life...
easy to face the fragility of life, and you've been forced to confront it
at a very young age. And as painful as it
is, you leave this university understanding better than most
that every day truly is a blessing never to be squandered
are taken for granted. It was a BU graduate student, Lu Lingzi, who lost her
life along with two other innocent people on a beautiful
April day in your sophomore year while
simply watching the Boston Marathon. I doubt you will ever forget where you were when
those two backpacks exploded a few miles from here
and knocked a city to its knees. But the initial hurt an horror
gave way to something much more powerful: Boston Strong.
You held each other for support and rose back up together.
I may live in New York, but our city was a sea of
Boston baseball caps in the weeks that followed,
and the Red Sox clinched the World Series that fall,
the entire nation cheered. [Applause]
Yes, you bore witness to the worst to mankind, but you also experienced the best,
and will carry that with you forever. You learned what it means to be resilient,
to stand side by side against any adversity, you are part of Boston Strong
and it will always be part of you. So now you're off, and I have a few final words of
practical advice.
Don't ever lose your enthusiasm. Don't suddenly become self-conscious.
Don't be that person who puts on a suit and takes off his glasses like this
mid-sentence
because he thinks it makes him look smart. Trust me, unless you're the
incredible Ed Bradley--CBS correspondent Ed Bradley--who was really cool,
or maybe a TV lawyer... It looks good for them, with everyone else
it's just affect. Stay away from affects.
Better yet, be the left shark.
Remember last Super Bowl when the Patriots won?
Yeah, well...
well you may be thinking of Tom Brady's deflated balls right now, but I'm
thinking a Katy Perry's
half-time performance. She was on stage dancing with two sharks.
The shark on the right knew every dance move and performed perfectly,
but it was the left shark, the one who went rogue and danced to his own crazy beat
who stole the show. So don't ever be a conformist
for convenience sake.
Or as Mark Twain put it, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of majority,
it's time to pause and reflect." Be the left shark!
By the way, you can purchase that on Ebay tonight.
And while I'm on the subject of water creatures,
there's an expression they use a lot in the news business, "If it looks like a duck,
swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably
a duck. Unless it has been auto-corrected,
and then we're all ducked."
The message here,
pretty simple, life isn't all that complicated. Things are what they are.
Don't read into everything. Just do your best and try to do
no harm. So here are my hopes for you graduates:
When you take off your cap and gown today, I sincerely hope you have clothes
on underneath,
but I also hope you realize that just learning to navigate college fosters a
quality that social scientists call "grit."
It means when you fall down, and you will, you will dust yourself off
and keep going. As you travel through life,
I hope you the deep footprints behind.
Not as a result of all the people you've stepped on to get ahead,
but rather as a result of all the lives you have lifted
along the way. And twenty or thirty years
from now, I hope you sitting where your family is
today,
clutching tissues and beaming with pride, remembering your own graduation and
thinking,
"You know that commencement speaker wasn't half wrong. Whatever her name was..."
Congratulations and good luck!