When I first came across the name of this year’s commencement speaker - Erik Weihenmayer - in the commencement schedule, I was like, “Erik, who?” So, I skipped his speech and other speeches, and only attended the last hour of the commencement. While the names of the many graduates were being called out, I was browsing through the commencement book and then found out that Erik Weihenmayer is the blind man who climbed to the top of Mount Everest!! Now, I regret not being there earlier. He is the only blind person to have climbed the “Seven Summits,” the tallest peak on every continent. Talk about raw guts and determination. Since I wasn’t there, I can only rely on the local newspaper for quotes from his speech.

To climb, Weihenmayer must reach out and find a crevice or something on the mountain face to grab hold of, not unlike what people do every day to move forward. ”The reality is that we’re always reaching out into darkness,” he said. But many people don’t keep moving out of fear of failure.

”I think those fears conspire against us and paralyze us,” Weihenmayer said. ”Pioneers understand that life is a never-ending process of reaching out into the darkness when we don’t know what we’re going to find.”
Morning Call (May 22, 2007)

As graduates, you will be entering a world of tremendous uncertainty and tremendous adversity, with wars, with overpopulation, with climate change, with disease, with hunger, with a clash of cultures and ideas, Weihenmayer said. It’s a chaotic world and it’s harder and harder to predict the future. Quite often, I think you’ll feel like you’re climbing blind.

I think this is the best time in history, the most precious time in history to be a pioneer, to reach out, to seize hold of adversity and the challenges we face, to harness the energy not only to transform our own lives, but to elevate the world around us.
Brown & White article

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Besides Weihenmayer, other quotes that caught my eye were from Patrick Belmont, the former treasurer of the Graduate Student Senate, who spoke on behalf of graduate school grads.
Go do great things and do them with passion.
Undo those things that are wrong in the world.
Act. Indifference is our biggest obstacle to progress.

This guy, together with a few other students, took on Lehigh’s administration to eliminate the $150 technology fee that graduate students have to pay every semester. They didn’t manage to eliminate it totally, but they got the administration to reduce it by half, which is remarkable. For a long time, graduate students have been complaining about the technology fee, but at last someone acted and persisted through the many no-s that came his way.

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Lastly, I have to write about Hidayah. She’s a fulbright scholar from Singapore. While, she was at NUS, she took a year of French, and then she went on a one-year exchange program to Paris. For a whole year, she was taught by world-reknowned people and studied everything in French. When she told us about her experience during the BBQ, we were in awe of her accomplishment. But she went on to tell us the price she had to pay for that. She said that every night while she was studying (with a dictionary by her side), she would be crying. As if college-level materials were not hard enough, she had to learn it in French! I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for her. And I cannot imagine putting myself in her situation.