

Northern Arizona University Commencement Ceremony for the College of Engineering, Informatics, and Applied Sciences and the College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences So I was excited to congratulate them before they begin the next stages of their lives, and share some wisdom I’ve picked up in the decades since I left my own college campus. It took resilience, grit, and a whole lot of ingenuity for them to cross this finish line. Before most of them completed their first year of college, a once-in-a-generation pandemic came along and changed life-and learning-as we knew it.

The class of 2023 is no ordinary group of graduates.

(You can read more about what drew me to NAU here.) Today, I delivered my third to the forestry and engineering graduates of Northern Arizona University. Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky to give two commencement speeches: one to Harvard-the alma mater I never graduated from-in 2007, and another to Stanford in 2014.
