Commencement

Lehigh's Commencement was held yesterday in Stabler Arena, with the Hooding Ceremony taking place a day earlier at Zoellner Arts Center.

The Hooding Ceremony is the ceremony where the doctoral candidates receive their hood, i.e., the symbol that they've become doctors, from their faculty adviser. (While caps and gowns are either rented or bought, students receive the hoods for free and keep them after the ceremony.) At MIT there were too many doctoral candidates for each adviser to go on stage and hood his or her own student, so it was done by a representative of the school the student was affiliated with, for instance, the School of Engineering, and some of the symbolism of the gesture was lost. I liked Lehigh's ceremony because the number of doctoral candidates is much smaller, so advisers - after making their students work very hard for many years - get to be the ones who reward the students with their hood once the latter have jumped through enough hoops and proved themselves worthy of the title of 'doctor'. I'll post pictures if I get them. The funny part is, a champagne reception was held afterwards, and while I was looking for Gokhan in the crowd, people kept coming up to me and congratulating me. (My reaction: "Thank you! Thank you!") What can I say, I am not going to complain. It's true that I look young, and some of the doctoral candidates were clearly older than me - people don't always go to graduate school straight after college. You can see from the hood whether the person has a Lehigh PhD or not because of its colors, but in the front all hoods for doctor of philosophy degrees have a dark blue velvet trim, so people assume all young-looking people in hoods just got their degree. (The back of the hood is in two colors, which determine the school where the student got his or her PhD. Lehigh's colors are brown and white, MIT's colors are red and light grey.) It's hard to believe I've already been at Lehigh for four years now; in some respects I feel like I've started yesterday. Gokhan entered our doctoral program with a Master of Science already in hand - that meant he had to take less courses to fulfill his degree than students who arrive with only a Bachelor's degree - and he did excellent research, which allowed him to graduate in a short time period. He is now going to become an Operations Research Analyst at American Airlines. Good luck Gokhan!

Yesterday was Commencement, under the rainiest, coldest weather you could think of. (In the words of the President of the Alumni Association addressing the newest alumni: "At least there was no hail.") Fortunately, faculty members sit under a tent, but students got soaked - their diplomas, though, did not, as they are handed in in some kind of plastic wrap that protects them of situations like these. After the singing of the national anthem and words of welcome by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees and President Gast, Meron Mengistu, a doctoral candidate about to receive her PhD in molecular biology, delivered the graduate student remarks in an excellent, inspiring speech about the power of education. She comes from Ethiopia where the dire lack of books makes it very difficult for young children to learn the skills that would allow them to lift themselves from poverty. As Mengistu pointed out, illiteracy is also an major issue in the United States - the numbers I found on the National Center for Education Statistics website indicate that, in 2003, about 11 million Americans struggled with low literacy skills, including 7 million who could not answer simple test questions. While the American mystique emphasizes self-determination (you are responsible for your own destiny, and the like), it is hard to see how anyone can take their fate into their own hands and work for a better future when that person doesn't know how to read. One of the reasons why I found Mengistu's speech so moving  is that domestic adult illiteracy is a cause dear to my heart, as you might have guessed from the "First Book" icon in the left margin of this blog.  First Book is a charity that gives books to children of low-income families. It is rated "gold" by Forbes and "four stars" by Charity Navigator (an independent charity evaluator that analyzes how donations are spent - we all wonder whether the money we give goes to paying the CEO or to helping the charity's target group; because everybody at First Book is a volunteer, every single cent goes toward books for children). Can you believe that a donation of $2.50 buys one book for a needy child? That's not even the price of a latte at Starbucks. As a side note, I encourage everyone to consider giving to First Book. It has been operating for sixteen years now and has just reached the important milestone of 60 million books given out.

After remarks by Matthew Montgomery,  President of the graduating class, William Amelio '79 delivered the Commencement Address. Mr. Amelio is the President and CEO of Lenovo Group, one of the top three PC companies in the world, and the co-founder of Caring for Cambodia. At Lehigh, he majored in chemical engineering and was a member of the wrestling varsity team. (He later earned a Master's degree in management from Stanford.) He started his remarks by telling us the circumstances surrounding Lehigh's decision, back in 1979, not to let him receive his diploma with his class - in March 1979, as he was trying to leave a fraternity party, a bunch of drunk students blocked his path and rocked his car while he was sitting inside. Amelio, tipsy himself and upset by the event, got out of the car and punched one of the kids. In wrestling, he competed in the heavyweight category, and apparently the kid he punched needed a very good dentist afterward. That kid, of course, went straight to the police to file a complaint. Lehigh took action by barring Amelio from attending the graduation ceremony. (It's interesting that the article posted on the Lehigh website only refers to "an altercation after drinking at a party" and doesn't mention that he had been provoked, although obviously that does not excuse punching someone.) Amelio described the anger he felt and how it took him time to learn to forgive and let go - forgive the people who had wronged him, forgive himself for throwing the punch that imperiled his career (he had a job offer at IBM that was conditional on him getting a degree and he was supposed to start right after Commencement), let go of his resentment, move on. I thought that was a powerful story; it even has a happy ending since he came clean in front of the IBM person who had hired him, and that person let him keep his job, although he didn't yet have his degree. (Finally, a real-life story about honesty that ends well.) Amelio also praised his wrestling coach for believing in him throughout the ordeal and seeing potential in him before he saw it in himself. As for Lehigh, it made up for the 1979 ceremony by conferring Amelio an honorary doctor in engineering.

I also appreciated Amelio's willingness to share that, twenty years later when he was working for Larry Bossidy, he received a poor performance evaluation that indicated he was acting in the detriment of the company; for instance, he seemed to have difficulties listening to other people. I liked Amelio's candid remarks about his impulse of denying all this, arguing the 50 colleagues who had been interviewed had all been wrong, before admitting he had a problem. I think what appeals to me in this story that, after the 1979 incident, he did not become a saint overnight. You often hear about teenagers who get involved in horrific crashes causing injury or death after a night of drinking (or who rob banks after becoming gambling addicts), and one of the things parents say to convince the judge to give a mild sentence is that the kid has seen the light and will go to schools to share his experience with other students. But the truth is, a new behavior requires reinforcement until it becomes second nature, and it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. Indeed, it's a bit suspicious if it does. People will fall off the bandwagon. The key is to stop themselves a little sooner every time until they really quit doing whatever harmful thing they were engaged in. Later, Amelio described how he founded Caring for Cambodia with his wife in 2003. Caring for Cambodia is a nonprofit foundation focused on education - a fitting detail in a ceremony that emphasized the honor and privilege of belonging to "the educated ones." (Mengistu quoted Aristotle: "The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.")

I also liked that Amelio took the time to praise Jaclyn Bedford, a finance major and member of the Graduating Class of 2008, who was injured in an horrific ski accident in January and airlifted to the hospital - back then it seemed impossible for her to graduate with her class, but in the end she was able to walk across the stage to get her degree. (In truth, it appears that she hasn't graduated yet, as her name doesn't appear in the list of graduates in the program - this would make sense since she must have spent most of the semester recovering and an accident like that would require her to withdraw from her Spring courses - but Lehigh allowed her to walk with her classmates nonetheless. Certainly a nice gesture, and a testimony to the resilience of a young woman who wasn't even sure to walk again four months ago.)

Finally, in the last talk before degrees were conferred (under cloudy, cold weather with occasional downpours of rain), President Gast gave a short speech, emphasizing - you guessed it - the power of education, which provided a nice lead for the mention of the historical gift to Lehigh from the estate of Donald Stabler' 30: over $34 million will go into a scholarship fund to "provide generations of students [with] the opportunity to attend Lehigh regardless of their financial circumstances." Gast also recognized a few unsung heroes —Meredith Aach, Sean Kessler and Tiffany Searles — of the Class of 2008, not because they were a rarity among their classmates but because they exemplify Lehigh's tradition of service (they will work at places like TeachForAmerica and AmeriCorps after graduation). I thought that showed President Gast's genuine interest in Lehigh's students, which she has demonstrated many times since she came to Bethlehem.

And then of course came the most exciting part - I was so happy to see my students graduate! This was such an important moment for them. They braved the rain in cap and gown, without umbrellas, to receive their well-deserved degree. I can't wait to hear what fantastic things they are all going to do with their lives.

Comments

[Ilya ^_^]

Congratulations! :P

Yeesh, you're still there, Prof. Thiele? Well, at least your summer's starting now (hopefully you can catch a break!)

[Aurelie]

I am on one of the graduation pictures taken by the official Lehigh photographer! It's the eighth picture in the photo gallery at http://www3.lehigh.edu/about/events/commceremony08.asp (the one at the bottom of the first column).