It’s May, so you all know what that means — college graduation season is in full swing. Leaving the place you’ve called home for four years is equal parts exciting, bittersweet, and a little scary. Perhaps that’s why college commencement speeches are so important. When we get a really amazing and inspiring speaker, things feel a little less daunting as we pack up for good and head out into the “real” world.
So, in honor of the class of 2017 (and everyone else who needs some inspiration right now), let’s take a look at some celebrity commencement addresses that will inspire you regardless of your age.
The iconic filmmaker and writer returned to her alma mater in 1996 to deliver one of the best commencement speeches of all time. Although the whole speech is filled with inspiring lines, these words in particular are incredibly relevant right now:
“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”
During her commencement address at University of Wisconsin — Madison, Couric got down with today’s lingo and urged the grads:
“Work hard, and then work even harder… There may be days when you’ll say to yourself, ‘I can’t. I literally can’t even.’ But you can! You can even!”
At George Washington University in 2013, Washington urged her alma mater’s graduating class to push themselves out of their comfort zones and write their own life stories: “You and you alone are the only person who can live the life that writes the story you were meant to tell.”
In 2011, Hanks addressed Yale’s graduating class and urged them not to give in to fear:
“Fear has become the commodity that sells as certainly as sex,” Hanks said. “Fear is cheap, fear is easy, fear gets attention … It’s fast, it’s gossip and it’s just as glamorous, juicy and profitable. Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance.”
Kaling brought a whole lot of laughter to Harvard Law School’s Class Day in 2014 (we’d expect nothing less), telling the grads:
“Even though I have no idea why I was asked to speak here today, I prepared a speech very carefully the way that any good Dartmouth-educated graduate would. I drank a 40 of Jagermeister. I called my dad to see if he would get me out of it — he could not… I tried to hire a college freshman to write it for me in exchange for a $200 gift card to Newbury Comics — that didn’t work out.”
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