Lavender Graduation Speech at Cornell in 2025

Good evening, beautiful people.

Graduates – sitting here tonight, you're glowing with the knowledge, skills, and stories that only you carry. Tonight, you have accomplished what generations before you only dreamed of, or may not even have dared to dream of. You made it through late nights, early mornings, and countless curveballs thrown at you—and you’re still standing. Still shining. Tonight isn’t just about crossing a finish line. It’s about celebrating every moment you decided to keep going.

We are gathered to celebrate your remarkable achievements and reaching this milestone, but equally importantly, we’re here to wish you well on the journey ahead. You’re stepping into a world that feels endlessly chaotic—economically, politically, socially. How well-prepared do you feel to set sail into these winds? It can be tempting to wait for clarity before making a move. But the truth is, clarity often follows action—not the other way around. 

If I could offer one idea to carry with you beyond tonight, it’s this: focus on getting really good at something. Better yet, figure out what you’re naturally talented at, and shape that talent into top-notch employable skills that pays the bills. Don’t fret if you haven’t discovered your “true interest” or calling. It’s not that passion doesn’t matter. It does. But passion is a fire that needs to be stoked and tended to. If you want a lasting blaze that doesn’t fizzle out quickly, you need to build a stable foundation with very unsexy looking bits of kindling, charcoal and logs, make sure there’s room to breathe, and wait patiently for the heat to build up and the sparks to fly.

You’ve all got those unsexy looking building blocks. They’re unsexy to you only because you’re so used to them that you don’t think they’re remarkable at all. Ask yourself: What comes really easily to me that other people struggle more with? Hone those strengths. They are the ingredients to your fire, and the quickest way to feed your fire is to become excellent at something. Become indispensable because you’re so good at what you do. Become impossible to ignore because your excellence is sought after. Excellence grants you autonomy. Autonomy gives you options. Having options gives you both power and freedom.

Excellence is also your ticket to financial stability. Financial stability is not just a personal milestone; it is a form of resistance. When you are financially secure, you are harder to intimidate, easier to trust, and better positioned to take risks. You can walk away from harm. You can back others when they need support. You can fund the future you want to live in.

Let me be clear: I urge you to become excellent and financially secure not so much because the capitalistic world we live in is more comfortable when you have means, but because you give yourself the best shot at staying true to yourself in a world that tries to box you in, hide and silence you when you have agency and power. Agency and power is freedom.

That freedom matters—not just for you, but for the people watching you, relying on you, and dreaming through you.

Cornell taught you how to think critically, write persuasively, and survive long, dark, cold and lonely nights. Take those skills and apply them—anywhere you can. You don’t have to know your forever path. You just have to start. The excellence you build now will open doors you don’t even know exist yet.

But on that note about thinking – don’t stop thinking. Don’t stop trying to understand yourself. Don’t stop examining and learning about the world around you and how it operates. Don’t stop thinking about what you value, what is important to you, and why those things are significant. Because when you take the excellence you have honed, and you trade it in for the power to create change, you will have to decide: what changes do I want to spend my power on?

When I was in your seat, I used to roll my eyes and get all smartypants with the term “critical thinking.” What’s critical thinking anyway? What’s so critical about it? Where does all this thinking leave me?

David Foster Wallace said that

“learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience…You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”

Every moment of your life has been, is, and will be filled with making the best decisions you can with the limited information and capabilities you have in that moment in the face of constant uncertainty. There will always be chaos, internally, externally, both at the same time. There will never be a good time for inconvenient things to happen. There will almost never be a clear sign of what the right choice is, or what the best path is. That’s what’s exciting about life. You never know for sure how things are going to go. But you can equip yourself with the best possible foundations to respond to all that will come your way and to keep your fire burning.

And when you succeed—and you will succeed—remember the words of beloved Cornellian Toni Morrison:

“When you get these jobs that you have so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

Lift others as you climb. Find, build and hang on to your community. Offer others the kind of support you once needed. Offer others the kind of support you were grateful to receive. Whether we notice it or not, none of us gets there alone—even if we like to say and believe “you’re on your own, kid; you always have been.”

Congratulations, Class of 2025. We need your brilliance. We need your tenacity. And we need your action. There’s a wild, brilliant, uncontainable future crackling in this room tonight. Go – go get really, really good. Our future awaits you.