August 4, 2007

Córdova: Commencement offers opportunity for bold beginning

Students: Our state, our nation, our world need your talent and your energy, your enthusiasm and your ideas. And now you are ready to make your mark because, yes, you are graduating! Congratulations students! Congratulations parents and friends! You did it, all of you.

Some of you parents, no doubt, are so excited that you feel like running down here and walking across the stage with your child.

They would prefer that you didn't. But nevertheless, as the parent of two college-age students, I know how you feel.

As these graduates receive their degrees, they are celebrating an accomplishment that springs from your support. You share in their success. This is a milestone day in their lives and in yours. Students, take a moment to show your parents your appreciation. Turn to them and wave.

Let me introduce myself for those who might be wondering who I am. I am the new president of Purdue University. I have been on the job now for almost three weeks.

Among my accomplishments at Purdue so far is finding my way through the maze of red brick buildings to Elliott Hall for this ceremony. I am learning my way around our beautiful campus. I am learning about its traditions and possibilities. This is a very exciting time for me, as well as for you.

You, graduates, and I have something in common. We are all at a beginning point. I am beginning my presidency at Purdue. You are beginning the next stage of your lives as you pursue your goals and dreams.

It is common for people to think of a graduation ceremony as an ending. It is not. If it were, we would call it a completion ceremony. Instead, we call it commencement, which means, "to begin."

You might feel very intelligent today as you await your diplomas after years of study and hard work. You have learned incredible lessons. You have done very well to succeed at this challenging university.

But learning does not end for you today. It begins. At Purdue what you have been given is the foundation to commence a lifetime of learning that will guide you on your path and set your future.

Beginnings are exciting; everything is fresh and new; anything is possible. Nineteenth century poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking about beginnings when he said: "I had an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken.

"Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet."

It is a beautiful thought. The first spoken words Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet on a day such as this one were: "Who's there?"

Well, like many beginnings, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't memorable, either. Look up Shakespeare in "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" and you will not find "who's there?"

But soon after that beginning he was writing lines so true that centuries later they continue as a part of our culture and language: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be;" "to thine own self be true;" "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy;" "we are such stuff as dreams are made on;" and, of course, "there's something rotten in Denmark!"

Beginnings do not all have to be as spectacular as the Big Bang. They just have to get us started.

Beginnings are not singular events. We have many beginnings in our lives.

In my own life, I began as an English major from Stanford University and wanted to write the great American novel. After school I began working as a waitress in Vail, then a guest travel writer/editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City.

My love for education then located me in Boston, where I renewed a passion for science and had the opportunity to begin studying at MIT. I began my Ph.D. in astrophysics at Caltech in California, which led to another beginning working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

In my life, I have experienced beginnings as an astrophysics department head at Penn State; chief scientist for NASA; vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara; chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; and now president of Purdue.

I have experienced beginnings as a wife, a mother, and I even began the Boston Marathon (and finished!).

You, too, will have many beginnings in your lives and careers as you meet your opportunities. Some of those opportunities will present themselves almost by surprise. Others you will have to pursue, and that will take determination. The drive to succeed and the confidence you have developed at Purdue will help you in this.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters - compared to what lies within us," Emerson said. What lies within you is potential that is limited only by the boundaries you set.

Sir Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 became the first to reach the top of Mount Everest, said: "It is not the mountains we conquer, but ourselves."

Every morning when we rise, the possibilities are all before us. The question for each of us is, what will I do with this new day? How can we use it not only to accomplish our own dreams, but also to help others pursue theirs?

The writer Goethe said, "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

I hope your life is filled with bold beginnings. And now it's time to get started.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees of Purdue University, congratulations class of 2007! Hail Purdue!

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