|  Ms.
Sze, Mr. Hobbs, Dr. Robertson, members of the Board of Trustees,
members of the faculty, staff, family and friends, and the graduating
Class of 2007, hi and good morning to you all.
Junior spring, a year ago, the College Office sent out a mock college
application or the student response form questionnaire to help us
get started with the whole college fiasco. At the top of the document,
there was a whole section about how this mock application is designed
to get me thinking seriously about college and my future. “An
effective search must begin with an honest self-assessment. Please
answer each question as honestly as you can.”
Alright, so it’s the night before the mock app was due, and
I’m on mock question #6 out of mock 10 and I still had a mock
essay to write afterwards. Question #6 read, “At this time,
what personal, educational, or vocational goals do you have in mind?
What areas of study might you like to pursue in college? Do you
have any clear idea about what you hope to do after graduating from
college? Where do you see yourself in ten years?” And then
in parenthesis the college counselors wrote “Have fun with
this one” with an exclamation mark at the end. Haah~
Oh-kaay. So, one, it’s past midnight and I still have a boatload
of history reading to do; two, talk about overload; and three, the
college counselors messed up ‘cause that’s definitely
four questions, not one. But it got me thinking. All of a sudden,
it was like time had momentarily stopped and bits and pieces of
my childhood were flashing before my eyes.
I remembered being a little girl, 4 or 5 years old, dressed in red
pajamas, standing on top of an overturned laundry hamper, pretending
I was singing on a stage. I remembered playing ‘tea-time’
with my dollies, I was the amazing chef who could whip up a full
course meal out of thin air. Then I was the Greek goddess Hera in
my elementary school play, sitting on a box…and doing whatever
Zeus told me to do. Fast-forward to about age eleven when I mastered
all four styles in swimming. Skip middle school cause that was just
terrible. Freshmen year, in Korea, okay yea skip that too. And finally,
sophomore year, I ended up traveling 6800 miles away from home sweet
home, Seoul, South Korea, to live at Milton Academy…learning
things I’d never heard of and doing things I’d never
imagined.
Amidst my late night session of childhood reminiscing, I became
aware that I have been in search of the answer to question number
6 since my red pajamas days. Theoretically, we all have been. And,
the light-bulb went off and I realized that there is no right answer
to number 6. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there ever
will be a final full stop answer to question number 6. There’s
always the ‘what if’ factor. ‘What if I took my
music seriously and devoted all my time and energy to singing?’
‘What if I committed to pre-med and ended up in training for
the next ten years? ‘What if I dropped out of college like
Bill Gates and created a company called MICRO-SUH…?’
Hah.
The search for the answer to question number 6 is like a ‘Choose
your own adventure’ book. Each choice you make sets you off
on a different route towards the end of the story. Each choice you
make will lead you to a new question and you’ll have to make
another choice: do you stay and accept the prince’s challenge
to a sword duel? Turn to page 4. Or do you run? Turn to page 8.
You won’t know until you try. You’ll never know for
sure what’s coming up. You may know what you’re doing
one day, but not the next. You may have a vague idea of what’s
going to happen…but not really; and that, I find, is such
a thrill. The ‘what if’ factor can determine all.
During my red pajama days, I always wanted to be something along
the lines of a singing-diva. I only know this because it’s
on video. Yea, my mother and father were obsessed with technology
and have documentation of every breath I took as a child. Then the
diva dream soon changed into a chef, a doctor, a teacher…really
the list is endless. Yet twelve years later, there I was bleary-eyed
and exhausted in front of the computer with question number 6 still
blank. Yea, being a doctor or a diva would be amazing; but I was
calculating risks and consequences. This whole honest self-assessment
thing was getting to my head and I couldn’t bring myself to
answer anything. But I’ll let you in on a little something:
it’s okay to not know your answer for question number 6.
Class of 2007. At this time of year, many people wish us the best
of luck in our years to come and tell us that we should never give
up on our dreams. I know what they mean, and I would like to say
the same to you all. But, by saying “Don’t give up on
your dreams,” I’d be contradicting myself in asking
you all to live in the future. Rather, I would like to say to you,
as clichéd as it sounds, to “Live in the now.”
By obsessing over what you’ll become or what the world will
be like in 10 years, you’ll be locking yourself onto a fixed
path. There’ll be no “Choose your own adventure”
story there. You’ll be too busy to even think about the ‘what
if’ factor. Everything you do will be for and towards an end.
Which isn’t bad, well actually it’s really really good
that you’re driven; but before you know it, you’ll be
denying alternate opportunities and assuming outcomes before they
even happen…because you know what outcome you want, or at
least you think you do…so you make choices based upon that.
Over the past three years at Milton, I’ve learned to ask ‘why?’
And often, ‘why not?’ or ‘why can’t I?’
It’s like I’ve become the annoying child who asks ‘why’
to everything. So when I ask myself ‘Why is Bill Gates so
great?’ I realize that it’s because he didn’t
dream of becoming the next Einstein. He dreamed of being different.
He dreamed of being unique. Well, no, specifically, he dreamed of
each American household to have a personal computer system. But
you get the picture. He acknowledged his ‘what if’ and
embraced it.
I did end up answering question number 6 last spring. And I wrote
the following. “I am sure of one thing: I don’t think
I will ever be completely sure of what I want to do in college or
after college until I’m actually there. But in ten years I
hope I am happy.”
So, fellow graduates. We are 184 ridiculously talented, unique individuals,
who each have had different Milton experiences. We’re all
equally equipped with the tools necessary to find the maybe existent,
maybe non-existent answer to question number 6. But I wish that
in ten years, we will all have embraced our ‘what if’
factors and that we are all very very happy.
Thank you.
[Back to Graduation 2007]
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