2024 Student Address

Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much, Dean Abramson, Provost Kotz, Thayer Board and Dartmouth Trustees, Thayer faculty and staff, graduates, and honored guests, for giving me the honor and opportunity to speak to you today.

Over the last year, like all of you, I've been pondering what comes next. A concept that has been running through my mind is the desire to pursue "outsized impact." Outsized impact, to me, that is what Dartmouth, and specifically Thayer, is all about. Coming from Berkeley, a large school where impact is simply expected due to its size, I've come to appreciate the difference at Thayer. Here, we are intentional while small, focused while interdisciplinary, and grounded while innovative and we too drive global impact. If our time at Thayer has taught us anything, it is how to make our contributions truly "outsized."

Consider the fundamental technology of the Covid mRNA vaccine that has saved millions of lives and brought our society back to normal. Built here.

Adimab, a company revolutionizing antibody discovery, leading to new drugs for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and rare genetic disorders. Built here.

And even more recently, with founders in the audience today, companies like Nanopath, which is developing new diagnostic technologies revolutionizing women's health, and Cryosphere Innovation which has enabled the real-time measurement of Arctic sea ice to power the next generation of climate change solutions. Built here.

In fact, when comparing Dartmouth and Thayer in terms of successful venture-backed start-ups, we rank in the Top 5 universities in the world. So, why?

I believe it is our unique, close-knit, and extraordinarily interdisciplinary community that allows us to form truly enduring relationships. It's not just about the individual qualities in everyone here, but in how we are intrinsically linked and connected to our very core, that matters.

I'm not sure what sort of sorcery these faculty members are using to bring you all here, but I know it's not by accident, and I am just so grateful to be a part of it. I hope I speak for most of us when I say, you are my people. You inspire me, you've supported me, and you've brought so much value to my life that I didn't know was missing until I got here. It's this community that makes Thayer so unique, so special, and it is the relationships we've built here that will enable us all too, to make an outsized impact on the world.

Now, before I close, I'd like to share a brief story of my grandmother who cannot be here to celebrate with us but whom without I would not be speaking with you today. By sharing some of her life lessons, I hope that her legacy will endure in all of us and perhaps provide us some guidance on our journey to make this outsized impact.

• Lesson one: always be on time, and if you must be late, apologize profusely. You didn't want to see my grandmother angry. And grandma, I am still working on this.
• Lesson two: listen to others but make your own decisions—unless your grandmother advises otherwise.
• Lesson three: emphasize strategy over plans.

Lesson three is the most important, and I didn't have the language to synthesize it before my time at Thayer. While my grandmother could be an obsessively detailed planner for small things, she never really planned out her life. Why? Because plans are brittle. They never work out exactly as expected. If you focus on a plan, especially a detailed one, when one step fails, the whole plan often crumbles.

Instead, she focused on a strategy: "Find a loving partner, see the world, and have no regrets." She did all these things. Growing up in Austria, after the War, she was supposed to get married at 18 to a good local family. She didn't care for that, calling off the engagement and leaving Vienna for a small lake town in southern Austria, then to Beirut, then to Rome, and then Greece, where she eventually met the love of her life and saw the rest of the world together. Her life was one that could never be planned, but she knew her strategy and seized every opportunity to try, leaving with no regrets.

So, what I've learned from her is that, instead of a plan, take your goals and outline some strategy—a set of rules that will enable you to make decisions that continually nudge you towards those goals and allow you to seize opportunities along the way.

Trust me, with this community in your corner, these opportunities will come. All we need is to be ready, open, and brave enough to reach out and take them.

Thank you, everyone—my fellow graduates, esteemed faculty, my advisor, my parents and partner, and my grandmother. Again, I hope I speak for all of us when I say, you are all my inspiration, my home, and my guiding light, and I can't wait to enter this next chapter with all of you, together.