Graduation Speaker

My graduation speaker yesterday was not that great. He started off strong - making a lot of well-appreciated jokes about how English majors enter college without a clue of what do with our lives, how no actual jobs stem from the English major, and how even though we all possess a secret, uncool love for Hemingway and Shakespeare, we are much more socially-adept than engineers and accounting majors. Unfortunately, however, after this intro, his speech devolved into a 20-minute montage of technological terms and political leanings, when a few concise words (Dream big. Follow your passions. Never give up) would have done the trick. In spite of this lack of relevance and eloquence in the graduation speech I heard, though, I managed to get something out of it. So here it is (and this one is for all of you that just moved back in with mom and dad, have no discernible plan for the future despite very responsibly applying for jobs this last semester, and are on the the verge of a huge post-grad melt-down):

My graduation speaker (let's call him Dan) graduated with a major in Rhetoric from the University of Illinois. Rhetoric is a fancy name for Creative Writing. Throughout undergrad, he bummed around. He switched his major three times, smoked a lot of hashish in Nepal during a study abroad experience (by his own admittance) and donned his cap and gown without a job or future plans. For FIVE years after he graduated, he continued to bum around. He bounced from jobs in the restaurant industry to one on salmon-boat to the construction industry to a gig on an oil rig. Finally, when he was 26, he had an idea for a company, and started it with three other people in a tiny office. The company was successful (so he added a few more ideas and a few more companies in there along the way). He eventually sold his company for an 'obscene' amount of money. My dad looked up this obscene amount on his iPhone in the middle of the ceremony: $750 MILLION.

Moral of the story? You can graduate with an English major and no job and still end up (nearly) a billionaire. It's probably hard now to keep things in perspective when your parents insist on calling you 'roomie' and a handful of your lucky friends are preparing for actual jobs and grad school to start...but stay grounded! We will all catch up and maybe (like Dan) end up with the millions required to fund the jet-setting, out-of-our-parents-houses post-grad lives we envisioned all along.

:)