{"id":3727,"date":"2009-06-02T11:15:19","date_gmt":"2009-06-02T11:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/02\/what-should-i-say-to-high-scho\/"},"modified":"2009-06-02T11:15:19","modified_gmt":"2009-06-02T11:15:19","slug":"what-should-i-say-to-high-scho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/02\/what-should-i-say-to-high-scho\/","title":{"rendered":"What Should I Say to High School Graduates?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in a line of work where I have to listen to a lot of graduation speeches– at least one per year. Yesterday, though, I got a phone call asking me to give<\/em> one at my old high school’s graduation in three and a half weeks.<\/p>\n

This is kind of a weird situation, because while it has been 20 years since I graduated (twenty years this year, in fact), and I have had a fairly successful career to this point, I’m not sure I can distill any generally applicable advice from that. I’ve been very lucky in a lot of things, and most of the coolest stuff I’ve had the opportunity to do has been through some weird and contingent process.<\/p>\n

So, I thought I would throw this out to my wise and worldly readers. If you were giving a talk to a graduating high school class, what would you say? And let’s take the “sunscreen” references as given, please.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ve got two vague ideas in mind. One would be a kind of “think like a scientist” spiel, basically building off stuff I said in posts like What Everyone Should Know About Science<\/a> and Science Is What Makes Us Human<\/a>, and talking up the virtues of science as systematized curiosity. This has the advantage of being fairly generally applicable and not too dependent on my personal history.<\/p>\n

The other line would be a “be open to opportunity” sort of thing. I’ve been very lucky in a lot of ways, but that luck has come about in part because I took advantage of opportunities that came my way. I ended up in academic research in part because one of my freshman physics professors announced in class that they were looking for a summer research student, and I followed up on that. That got me a couple of summer jobs and an in with the NIST group where I did my grad school research. This is more personal, which in some ways makes for a better speech, but it runs the risk of coming across as bragging.<\/p>\n

It’s also a little difficult to do that one without having it reek of economic privilege– it’s easy to run with opportunities and do what you love when you don’t have to earn money to support a family. That’s going to be a fairly immediate concern for a fair number of graduates, unless the local demographics have changed in improbable ways over the last twenty years.<\/p>\n

It’s a tricky question. I’ll come up with something, I’m sure, but I am interested to hear what other people think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m in a line of work where I have to listen to a lot of graduation speeches– at least one per year. Yesterday, though, I got a phone call asking me to give one at my old high school’s graduation in three and a half weeks. This is kind of a weird situation, because while… Continue reading What Should I Say to High School Graduates?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}