Congratulations Cum Laude Seniors

The cum laude seniors are as follows:

Alexandra Lai Ching Kao Andrews
Emily Winthrop Auchincloss
Jane Wilson Baldwin
Danielle Sara Bitterman
Christoph Ding
Timothy Jonas Eisen
Ariel Jennifer Fein
Marie Louise Frevert
Joshua William Goldman
Amit Kumar Gupta
Mariam Aida Hinds
Jared Michael Kozal
David Matthew Krantz
Stephen Bernard Lichenstein
Gregory Charles Lustiber
Matthew Aaron Mandelkern
Samantha Pauline Herron Mashaw
Natalie Julia Mathews
David Robert Mesham
Aaron Matthew Pollak
Albert Songhyun Ryou
Rachael Leigh Sanders
Hannah Ruth Schutzengel
Baris Sevinc
Charles Maximilian Walden
Heather Jane Wegner

Marc Ruben's speech:

When Mr. Pizarro invited me to speak here tonight, I emailed him with a bunch of questions. Chief among them was the following:

The guy who spoke at this thing ten years ago, when I was a senior, was a bestselling author. Should I be worried that my Dad still pays my cell phone bills?

He was nice enough to answer all my other questions, but he left that one blank.

I gave the graduation speech at Hopkins ten years ago, and I’m not sure of Mrs. Riley told you this, but, I’ve been asked back because I didn’t finish giving that speech.

You see, Sandy MacMullen had been riding me hard all week, telling me I had to keep it to eight minutes, and I went a little long. And just as I was getting to the good part, he gave me one of these [throat-cut gesture], and I kept going, and then Mrs. Wich cued up the opening bars of “May the road rise up to meet you,” and that was that.

I’m not sure that a lot of people in the audience noticed, except a few friends I’d given annotated copies of my speech so they’d know when to laugh, but I’ve always wished I weren’t cut short that day.

So I want to start tonight by delivering, at long last, the “director’s cut” alternate ending of my valedictory speech. I was young man full of optimism and hope, and I spoke of the bright future I expected for Hopkins, for this country, and for the world. Here it is.

[fries with that? voice] “And so I conclude today, full of optimism and hope. (sorry, I was a bit of a ‘late bloomer’—I’ll just keep going) Because I believe in people, I believe in the class of 1997, and I know we’re going to go out and do great things. I believe that ten years from now, we’ll look back and realize that the Internet has brought us all closer together, ushering in an unprecedented era of peace among the nations. What’s more, electronic mail will have replaced phones, even those new phones that attach to your car and use the airwaves instead of wires. “Global cooling” will have begun, because Al Gore will have been president since 2000. And we’ll all listen to music on a tiny contraption called a “mini-disc”, no bigger than a playing card, that will hold up to FIFTEEN SONGS!

“And what about fair Hopkins, fellow graduates? I predict Hopkins will take a cue from returning Mountain School students and turn The Pit into a working sheep farm. We’ll finally, finally have a woman as the head of school. And Mrs. Fosset assures me that despite the accident this year, within a decade the radiation in the Bio pond will return to a level considered “acceptable for limited human contact” by nuclear regulatory agencies.”

So that was my speech. I guess things didn’t quite happen the way I predicted they would. Except for the part about a woman head of school. That’s almost as good as world peace anyway.

What have I been doing since graduation day? Well, that’s really what I came to talk to you about. Not so much about the action-packed life of fighting injustice as a nonprofit consultant, although I’m happy to show you my cape later, but about the path I took to wind up here. Because I think your parents, of all parents, need to hear it.

Let’s face it. They are flying pretty high right now, as well they should be. You kicked butt in high school, you did your homework, you got into a fancy college, you even got Cum Laude, and they never found the about that party you held Junior year. Just the one you held Sophomore year. And best of all, it’s going to be the two-thousand-teens before you move back into their basement.

But you want them to be prepared for that day. And for the day you tell them about your plan to quit the college soccer team to pursue your sewing, or leave school and move to Afghanistan. So here I am. A successful 28-year old man, with a fulfilling career and the meager beginnings of a retirement account, engaged to a future human rights lawyer, and I’m going to tell you about the circuitous route I took to my late-mid-twenties.

My story starts on a cold November night in 1978, in the obstetrics ward of Yale New Haven Hospital. Just kidding. I’m sticking to the last ten years. And don’t worry—just the highlight reel.

I went to college close to home, and I had a blast. I sang in an a cappella group, toured across the oceans with them, led freshman outdoor orientation trips, made great friends, fell in love. I picked my major by going through the course catalog and tallying up how many interesting classes I found in each department. And then, partway through my Sophomore year, I decided I wanted to see what it was like not to be in school—now that I could tie my own shoes and everything.

I signed the papers for a year-long leave of absence with little idea of what I was going to do with it. My parents were… curious. I ended up working as the musical director of a camp that summer, where I wrote and produced two musicals for kids and started a singing group. Then I got an internship in DC with a government watchdog group that targets wasteful spending projects that harm the environment. I knew one person in town, my brother, but I made a little life for myself, jogging around the monuments at sunset, delivering papers at Congressional offices in my post-Bar Mitzvah suit, and singing on Sundays with the National Cathedral Choir. At the end of the semester I got to be on their Christmas-morning broadcast and meet Desmond Tutu, who gave the sermon that day.

And while I was in DC, I had been planning for the second half of my year off. I knew I wanted to do something in a Spanish-speaking country, and I found out about an organization in Nicaragua that uses American funding to support a handful of Nicaraguan-run social projects. I read a bunch of books on the Nicaraguan revolution of the 1980’s, got my vaccines, and convinced the woman who ran the project to email my parents about how safe it was in Nicaragua. No malaria, clean water, she was a nice girl from Arizona who had been living there for nearly 20 years and was raising a 6-year-old…

I remember laying down across the back seat of our station wagon on the way to Newark airport, tears running down into the upholstery, thinking, “I have absolutely no idea what I’ve gotten myself into.” But 12 hours later, I was riding through the hot night in the back of a pickup truck with three American volunteers who would become my close friends, learning Spanish slang and feeling very alive. I lived in Nicaragua for six months, working with street kids. Street kids are children who, in a country with more resources, like ours, would be caught by the social safety net. In a country as poor as Nicaragua, there is no such thing. Kids whose parents beat them, or use drugs, or simply can’t feed another mouth, end up on the streets, living under bridges or boarded-up stalls in the markets, stealing to eat. To numb the hunger and the insults, they almost invariably turn to sniffing glue. I became friends with 7 year old boys who were drug addicts, and 14 year olds who didn’t know their ABC’s.

I got back from Nicaragua with a different sense of my place in the world. I had always known I was privileged, but being there made me realize that I was at the very tippy top of the pyramid, with so many more resources than most of the world. I began taking classes about race and class and public policy, and I began to think a lot about media and mass culture and the news and why it is that people believe what they do, why some of the stories that are so critical go untold, or told to a very few. And I became more firm in the conviction that I wanted to do nonprofit work.

So I did college on the five-year-plan. And by the time I began my Junior year, I had sung for presidents, slept in dirt, played Beatles songs with old Nicaraguan men, seen the perverse game of politics up close, written a musical about cream cheese, and I still had idea what I wanted to do with my life. So I did what I enjoyed and was passionate about. As a result, my last two years of college were filled with deep friendships, life-altering conversations, papers that took every ounce of intellectual rigor I possessed. And I graduated.

If my parents were nervous when went to live in New York City, with no job, and spent six months sleeping on a camping mattress in my friend’s hallway, they did a good job of hiding it. I’m not saying they were talking me up at cocktail parties, but... I ended up working part-time out of the apartment of a woman who did public relations for different nonprofits, and that’s how I got into the field of nonprofit communications, where I’ve been for four years now. It’s a marriage of so many of my interests: telling the stories that go untold in our media, furthering social justice, and helping people work together to impact laws and policies.

I’ve spent the past two years as a consultant doing online issue campaigns and fundraising for nonprofits. Don’t worry, my parents barely know what that means, either. It means an organization like Planned Parenthood or Human Rights Campaign or Save Darfur comes to us when they want to change something. And we have a bag of tricks that we use to get things changing. We send out emails to their list. We run ads and pitch stories in the media. We throw up a website and get bloggers talking about it. We get thousands of people to email and call their legislators. We get them to write to their local papers, organize house parties, hold bake sales, volunteer, hand out flyers, show up at rallies, all for the sake of the issue we’re working on. We also raise money. And occasionally, it works.

I’ve fallen into this career where I’m engaging in the world on a daily basis. I’m getting to work on the most important causes of the day: the genocide in Darfur, the abortion ban in South Dakota last year, Hurricane Katrina, gay marriage, voting machine errors, global poverty. It’s hard to get bored.

Did writing that musical about cream cheese help me get here? Who knows. Did I think, when I was 18, that I’d end up doing this? Definitely not. But my story is by no means unique. People in our generation are reinventing themselves more than any other. The average American switches jobs 8 times before the age of 32. In fact, the year I graduated from Hopkins, the term “quarter-life crisis” was invented to describe the indecision about career choices that many young people experience after college. But I don’t see it as a crisis. The choices we make are about our culture, our economy, our debt, and most of all, about a vision that we CAN do something we love, and make it work. And some of us don’t quite hit it on the first try.

My four best friends from Hopkins are living proof. In high school, we basically thought we were the same person. We liked the same music, we had the same political beliefs, we even wore the same clothes. Literally. We all had the same pants, there are pictures. But the last decade has proved that we’re our own people. One of us was a professional actor and theater director for a few years, and he’s about to step behind the lens at film school. Another worked with kids in New Haven’s toughest neighborhoods, and she’s now a community organizer who just founded her own nonprofit in New Haven. Another, who spent three years working on criminal justice issues, is now a professional singer-songwriter who tours nationally and has two self-produced albums to her name. And one of us is became a doctor on Friday and is about to start her residency at Johns Hopkins. Among my other friends, I know a health researcher who’s now a professional chef, a successful Hollywood costume designer who gave it up to go to Med School, and an astrophysicist who’s going into corporate finance.

So parents, are you hearing me? The route may be a circuitous one. Trust the adults you’ve raised to do the right thing. And graduates, you too? You may end up in a faraway land, but you’ll find your way to a path that feels right to you. Do what you love, and don’t forget what a privilege you’ve had in getting such an incredible education at Hopkins. Give back as much as you can, whatever you’re doing. There’s always a way. Ten years from now, you may not become a bestselling author, your dad may still pay your cell phone bills, but if you do what you love, you’ll be in the right place.

Thank you.