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Commencement Address Thank you Chancellor! Distinguished members of the platform party, my fellow professors, cherished family and friends, and today's honored graduates: I congratulate each of you for your hard-earned achievement here at CU. I'd like to talk with you today about a topic which I know to be near and dear to the heart of every CU graduate. Quantum Mechanics. But first, let me tell you about this movie I saw last week. The movie was a recent remake of "Freaky Friday". I was dragged to see it, kicking and screaming, by my seven-year-old daughter. But when I got there, it was actually way better than I expected. It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a psychotherapist who has a very strained relationship with her teenage daughter. The mother can't really talk with her daughter; she can only spout various lines of psychology jargon. Dropping her daughter off at high school, one morning Jamie Lee Curtis calls after her anxiously, "Goodbye, dear, have a good day at school. Make good choices!" Her daughter cringes, and sure it is embarrassing, but in the end, isn't that the theme of every commencement address ever made, since the very dawn of academia? Go forth, graduates, and make good choices! Look, you can't expect a Physics professor to give a lecture without a lecture demonstration. Happily, I seldom venture out of my office without a piece of scientific apparatus under my academic robes. Check out this old tennis-ball can, and see this quarter, with a heads and a tails on it. I'll give it a good shake now. Off comes the lid. Let's have a look. It's tails! That was an easy experiment. Let's shake it again, but not open the can for a while. (pause) Among physicists and philosophers, there is a school of thought that asserts that, until we open the can and have a look, the coin is neither head nor tails, but instead it is in limbo, in some strange undetermined combination of the two. It's as if the coin itself hasn't chosen whether to be heads or tails. This indecisiveness is the central idea in my field of research -- which is called quantum mechanics. Now the coin rattling in the can makes its heads-or-tails decision randomly. But you, all of you, you do not. As rational human beings, as ethical human beings, as loving human beings, but above all as HUMAN human beings, you make the choices of your life through a process which is hard to understand, but not at all random. I echo Chancellor Byyny when I ask each of you to choose to aim high. Choose to do something a little too hard for you rather than a little too easy. Choose to risk failure. Choose goals worthy of a life worth living. Choose to make yourself into a person better than you have been. Choose to help a neighbor in need. Choose to turn off the tube, get up and get going. It is when you decide to do one thing, and not another, that you define your life. Your choices are who you are. When you don't choose, when you let things just happen to you, you are choosing to let the choices be made for you. When you don't choose, when you do something simply because you have always done it, or because it seems sorta kinda to be what is expected of you, maybe, you are giving up your only opportunity to define who you are and what your life means. Don't let that opportunity slip by. The process of creating your own life through your own choices is not easy. But you don't have to do it alone. By all means ask advice. But for your own sake, before you ask someone for advice, and certainly before you listen to that advice, ask YOURSELF, do I respect the choices this person has made? What do I feel about the consequences of the choices this person has made? Above all, remember in the end that your life is no one's life but your own. This means that when you ask for advice, you are asking for advice. You are NOT asking for permission. But sometimes, you weigh all the considerations, you think hard about what matters to you, about your moral values, about what sort of person you want to become, about what you want to accomplish, you gather information, you heard the advice of people you respect, you reflect, and still, you just can't make up your mind. Your options seem equally attractive. Or equally unattractive. Time to get out the old tennis-ball can. Heads or tails will decide. Shake up the can for a good ten seconds. Put the can on the table, grab that lid, and then... Wait! Do not open the can! Reflect for a second. Right now, right at this moment, you are hoping you will open the can to find a particular result. You know it. Secretly, you want to see something when you open the can. I don't know which one you want, but I know you want one of them. Hold that thought. Now as scientists, we may believe that the coin in the unopened can is in a weird state of suspended animation, half heads, half tails. As if in some half-real dream. But you aren't in a half-real dream, not anymore. Now whatever you do, don't you dare open the can! Ever! Let the coin hang there in its quantum mechanical suspended animation forever. It is irrelevant. You made your choice the moment you realized what you were hoping to see when you opened the can. You've made your choice, now go live your life. And when I say, "go live your life", what I mean to say is (and here I represent all of your professors in Boulder when I echo Jamie Lee Curtis's concerned and motherly character): "Good bye, dear students. We hope you had a good time at school. Now go make good choices!" Commencement Address Chancellor Byyny, distinguished members of the faculty, parents, families, friends – and graduates of the class of 2003, it’s a pleasure and a great honor to be here today and to speak to you at this commencement exercise. It’s such a special day for all of you assembled here:
It’s also a special day for me – to come back to CU – to see how the campus has changed, to talk to bright young people who are learning to meet the needs of our nation. Walking around campus today brought back some great memories from my time here as a student -- hiking near the Flatirons, spending afternoons at the Timber Tavern playing foosball (yes, this was before there were video games), biking up Boulder Canyon, skiing mid-week; oh, and of course, all the important things I learned in the classroom. For you individual members of the class of 2003: You’ve made it! Congratulations! And what an accomplishment! You’ve studied and worked hard, and with the help of many others, you’ve accomplished your goal of finishing college and fulfilled your dream of acquiring a college degree. I know that you graduates are most grateful to the many people who have made such a great contribution to your college education. I’m sure you will never forget the concern and dedication of the CU professors who have unselfishly given of themselves to your enterprise in learning. And I know, too, how much you realize that your present achievement is a testament to the love, support, and encouragement of your parents, family and friends whose presence here today makes your graduation a particularly joyful occasion. Today, as you graduate, you leave one of the finest universities in the world, one that excels in many fields, from Nobel Prizes in Physics, to cognitive disabilities research, to the exploration of space. The reason I’m your speaker today is due to the close link that CU has with our nation’s space program. I’m especially pleased to be part of this commencement because of that strong relationship between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the University of Colorado. Coming here is almost like visiting another part of the NASA space exploration community, for together NASA and CU have studied our atmosphere, examined other planets, and researched microgravity materials processing. CU faculty and students have actually built and operated satellites, they have designed instruments for deep space missions, and have used the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as laboratories for their experiments. But our closest tie is the human one -- people working together to achieve national goals as we explore our universe and fulfill our dreams. Hundreds of CU graduates work in our space program and 17 have served as astronauts in our quest for discovery and exploration. But with all great human endeavors there are dangers, and all of us in the CU family have felt the terrible loss of some of our own following the recent Space Shuttle Columbia accident, and further in our past, the loss of the Challenger. We have the unfortunate distinction of having a fellow CU graduate on each of our lost shuttles. Ellison Onizuka and Kalpana Chawla proudly represented the University of Colorado when they flew on the Space Shuttle, carrying momentos from the university, which they returned when speaking to students and faculty about their great adventures in space. They were living their dreams, which they pursued with enthusiasm and joy. At the memorial service for the Columbia crew in Houston a few months ago, President Bush said, “This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose, it is a desire written in the human heart”. Many of us have this desire and share the dream of leaving the Earth’s gravity and exploring our vast universe. We all have dreams - As a child, while fielding baseballs on a sandy lot in rural Alabama, I dreamed of playing third base for the New York Yankees, and later, when I read science fiction novels about flying on rockets and space voyages, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut and living in space. It is important for each of you to know that we all can realize our dreams or at least many of them. I never played for the Yankees, but I did get to fly on a rocket and did live and work in space for six months. Dreams are not fulfilled overnight but are accomplished through years of goal setting, moving forward one step at a time, often with setbacks along the way. I submitted my first application for astronaut duty in 1978, then had to repeat the lengthy process six times over the next nine years. Each rejection was a blow to me but I continued to gain experience and to improve my credentials until I was finally accepted in 1987, achieving another in a long line of personal goals. But for those who reach for their dreams and are driven by a sense of commitment they will achieve something special. I encourage you to continue to seek paths to fulfill your dreams even when they are hard and filled with risk, like the paths to space taken by El Onizuka and KC Chawla. You all have something special to bring to the world, something only dreamed about until now, and something that will not be unless you bring it into existence by pursuing and fulfilling your dreams. As you move today from academic life into the “real” world, each of you has an image in your mind of the perfect job, which you seek. Very few of you will find it right away. But you can find something unique and exciting in every endeavor if you look for it. And it can be a stepping stone to accomplishing goals that will lead to your dreams. Your being here today is a testament to dreams pursued and achieved. You have today achieved a major one in your life, and there are many more of them to come. So, let me conclude by saying again that we proudly and most sincerely applaud your success. Congratulations! And never forget to dream! |
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