[APPLAUSE]
RAFAEL REIF: Thank you, Temi,
and thanks to you and to AJ for your thoughtful and inspiring
remarks, both of you.
And to Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, thank you
for showing all of us how much good one MIT graduate can do,
thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, it is my turn.
To the terrific graduates of 2022, congratulations.
[APPLAUSE]
My job today, as you heard, is to deliver a charge to you.
And I will get to that in a minute.
But first, I want to recognize the people who
helped you charge this far.
To everyone who came here this morning to celebrate
our graduates, welcome to MIT.
To everyone joining us online from around the world,
we're so happy you could be with us.
And to the parents and families of today's graduates
here and everywhere, a huge congratulations to you as well.
[APPLAUSE]
This day is a joyful result of your loving support
and sacrifice.
And for that, you have our deepest respect and admiration.
I also know that a few years ago, many of you
may have thought that you had succeeded
in sending your offspring away for college or grad school.
But things didn't turn out exactly that way,
so please know how much we appreciate you.
Now to our new graduates, it has always
puzzled me when events like this are referred
to as commencement exercises.
Because they involve so much sitting down.
So I'm going to follow [? Tammy ?] and start
with a little something to get our hearts moving.
At MIT, one thing we understand is the importance
of distinguishing the signal from the noise.
But sometimes if the noise is noisy enough,
it actually becomes the signal.
We all know that getting through MIT is not a solo performance.
In fact, it usually takes an orchestra of loving assistance.
So I would like each of you to hold in your mind
now all the people who helped you
along the way, your family, your role
models, your professors, your teaching
assistants, your friends.
In a moment, I hope that, together, we can send them
a signal in a very noisy way.
To do that, it's easy.
You will need to just say two words as loud as you can,
thank you.
You got it?
Just those two words, thank you.
OK, now ready, on the count of three, 1, 2, 3--
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
RAFAEL REIF: Look, you are lucky that I had already
agreed to gray this as personal record.
That first attempt was pretty good, but you can do better.
I believe in you.
So I'm going to give you another chance.
And this time, let's try it with your hands
up in the air, all the way up.
Now, nice and loud, so that even noisy for those online.
1, 2, 3--
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
RAFAEL REIF: And thank you right back.
[APPLAUSE]
So why did I ask you to do that?
I knew it would create a brief pleasant sensation
for the people you love, but I was also
after something deeper.
Just ask anyone from Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Course--
AUDIENCE: 9.
RAFAEL REIF: I was afraid you didn't know that.
Course 9, of course, as anyone from Course 9 can tell you,
research indicates that simply expressing gratitude
does wonderful things to your brain.
It gets different parts of your brain
to act in a synchronized way.
It lights up reward pathways.
It gives you even a little shot of dopamine.
In other words expressing gratitude and appreciation
for other people is good for our brains,
and it's also very good for our hearts.
We are living in a difficult and complicated moment in history.
All of us, all of us could use a reliable device
for feeling better.
So now thanks to brain science, Thanks to Course 9,
you have one.
The gratitude amplifier is unbreakable.
Its battery never dies.
It'll never try to sell you anything.
You can use it every day forever, and it's free.
It is a graduation , present you can take with you anywhere even
if all your moving boxes are already taped shut.
I am so extremely grateful to have all of you
here on Killion Court on this wonderful day
for this tremendously important occasion.
I expect that those of you graduating may come to this day
with mixed feelings, with excitement for your next steps,
but with some sense that you did not get enough time on campus,
enough time with your professors, enough time,
especially with each other.
For that reason, I am particularly
grateful that you're here in person.
And looking back, I'm also grateful for how much
I have learned from members of this class.
I want to focus on one effort that several
of today's graduates helped to lead,
an effort to create an antidote to intensity.
We all know that MIT is intense.
That is why we love it.
MIT attracts intense people, like all of you.
And then we push each other, and we
inspire each other intensely.
But everyone needs a break from the intensity sometimes.
Different students find different ways
to relive it, music, sports, ballroom dancing.
And some students even find relief
by inventing ways to relieve stress for other people.
A few years ago, before the pandemic,
a group of students on the Undergraduate Association
looked around and concluded that what they maybe really needed
was a casual place in the middle of campus
where students could stop, relax,
hang out, study if need be, and get free food 24 hours a day.
When that space freed up in room 26-110,
the Banana Lounge was born.
[CHEERING]
Yes, yes, the Banana Lounge.
For those who have not been there yet
the Banana Lounge is a long sunny room near the main campus
crossroads.
It is full of colorful paintings,
great big leafy plants, LEGO sets, beanbag chairs,
and boxes and boxes of bananas.
Now, as a native of Venezuela, I take--
[CHEERING]
I love that.
I take certain things very seriously.
And one of them is tropical fruit.
If they had asked me, it would have been all about mangoes.
[CHEERING]
Thank you for that.
But of course, with a mango, there
is that huge slippery, ridiculous seed.
As the students determined very quickly,
the mangoes simply could not compete
with the elegant engineering of the seedless, self-packaged
banana.
In its charming quirkiness, the Banana Lounge is very MIT.
And it turns out to be very MIT in every other way too.
The students began with a prototype lounge,
tested it in real-world conditions,
and optimized it for efficiency and comfort.
They evaluated competing fruit for comparative nutritional
content, analyzed alternative supply chains, determined
the ideal green/yellow ratio in purchasing,
and worked to minimize the per banana unit cost.
They tried and calibrated the temperature and humidity
of their banana inventory in real time online.
And they established protocols to freeze excess supply,
and to capture the value as banana bread.
They secured funding from a very generous member
of the class of 1987, Brad Feld, who paid
for all of this year's bananas.
Thank you, Brad.
[CHEERING]
And they developed the cutting edge concept
of free coffee, which in their words
was critical to stimulating the lounge atmosphere
and promoting conversation.
Already, the banana has--
the lounge has served more than 500,000 bananas.
Two of them were mine.
And it has generated a very significant number
of banana-induced naps.
The students have done all this essentially themselves,
applying their MIT skills, and the most delightful MIT values.
They identified an unarticulated problem,
there to try a crazy idea, worked incredibly hard,
and in the process, they built a wonderful, tropical, perfectly
improbable, new MIT institution.
And we could not be more grateful.
So it is in that spirit that I deliver my charge to you.
I'm going to use a word that feels very comfortable at MIT,
although it has taken on a troubling new meaning
elsewhere.
But I know that our graduates will know what I mean.
After you depart for your new destinations,
I want to ask you to hug the world until you make
the world a little more like MIT,
more daring and more passionate, more rigorous, inventive,
and ambitious, more humble, more respectful, more generous, more
kind.
And because the people of MIT also
like to fix things that are broken,
as you strive to hug the world, please
try to heal the world too.
Our society is like a big, complicated family in the midst
of a terrible argument.
I believe we can each try to make it better by finding ways
to listen to each other with compassion,
to focus on achieving our shared objectives,
and to try constantly to remind each other
of our common humanity.
I know you will find your own ways to help with this healing
too.
This morning we share with the world
almost 3,700 new graduates who are
ready for this urgent and timeless problem set.
You came to MIT with exceptional qualities of your own.
And now after years of focused and intense dedication,
you leave us equipped with a distinctive set of skills,
and steeped in this community, deepest values, a commitment
to excellence, integrity, rising on your own merits, boldness,
humility, an open spirit of collaboration, a strong desire
to make a positive impact, and a sense of responsibility
to make the world a better place.
So now go out there, join the world, find your calling,
solve the unsolvable, invent the future, take the high road
try always to share your bananas,
and you will continue to make your family,
including your MIT family, proud.
On this wonderful day, I am proud of all of you,
to every one of the members of the graduating class of 2022.
Please accept my best wishes for a happy and successful life
and career.
Before I end my dear graduates, congratulations.
[APPLAUSE]
[AUDIO LOGO]