Bryn Mawr College 2014 Commencement Speaker: Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air"

0:08 thank you i want to start by thanking you for allowing me to share this very special day with you i was proud when i was invited to be your commencement speaker and even prouder not to have been disinvited or or forced to withdraw because of student protests thanks for that i actually feel very connected to bryn

0:40 mawr two years ago one of the women graduating here was now is now our associate producer for online media molly c v nesper so i feel i feel very connected so many of you know me as the lady you were forced to listen to in your parents car or in the car pool on your way to and from school every day and here you are on one of the most important days of your lives forced to listen to me again

1:09 and you're probably wondering so what's she going to do today ask questions that's not going to work is it the best thing i can do is share with you some of my own experiences and hope that it might be relevant to the occasion in biographical interviews i often focus on the period that many of you have just come through i guess late teens and early 20s because this is when a person becomes who or he or she is it's the

1:35 period when we gradually will the adult version of ourselves into existence in fact i think of college particularly out of town college not as just a place for higher education but a place for self-transformation as well when you're growing up your parents your teachers even your closest friends may think they know who you are and what to expect from you but maybe you think you're not really the person everyone else thinks you are yet if you start behaving differently

2:04 even if you start dressing in a different way people might think it's out of character and that you're being a phony so that you're trapped but once you leave for college you leave behind everyone else's conception of who you are and this can be liberating you can change how you look and on a deeper level you can change aspects of your personality and develop into the person you want to be i speak from experience i was raised in

2:31 a very structured goal-oriented middle class family and straight through high school i studied hard and i got really good grades but that person i was in high school i didn't want to be that person anymore when i started college in part because if i'm being honest i worry that the new people i was meeting would find that person boring it was 1968 which i mentioned because knowing the era might help make sense of some of the things i tried

3:00 beginning with dropping out of school for a semester and hitchhiking cross-country with my boyfriend on returning to school i went to as few classes as possible and did as little work as possible i tread on various personalities i tried becoming a hippie but being a free spirit proved impossible for someone as self-conscious as i was and still am i was briefly part of a wannabe rural commune in which we slept in tents grew vegetables and attempted to dig our own well but i

3:32 mean what was i thinking i cannot function without flushed toilets and restaurants within walking distance as ludicrous as some of this seems to me now it was actually very liberating all of it helped teach me who i was by teaching me who i wasn't and yet i retained certain traits of each of those people i tried to be because some of those traits genuinely were me remember how i said i was determined to stop being so studious

4:01 well now when people want to compliment me on my interviews they'll say wow you really do your homework and i mean i do for better or worse i spend nearly every weekday night at my desk pouring through research for the following day's interviews so it turns out the studious person i was in high school the person i thought i bid farewell on leaving home took her place beside all the people i tried to remake myself into in college

4:26 who you are is still evolving and you may find that like me you end up drawing on those parts of yourself that you once rejected rejected because they didn't seem cool enough or interesting enough most of my guests on fresh air are on the show because they've been successful and they're given fields but i often find myself talking with them about the frustrations and outright failures they've experienced professionally or in their private lives and i think this is

4:54 because i believe we're shaped by our failures by our weaknesses and setbacks at least as much as we are by our successes and in many cases those failures make make ultimate success possible i speak from experience when it comes to frustration self-doubt and even outright failure i failed miserably at my first profession which wasn't radio it was teaching eighth grade english not that i felt teaching was my calling but there i was an english major

5:24 clueless about what i might do professionally so i figured i'll be a teacher but i was completely unprepared for how difficult it would be i didn't have what it took to be an authority figure you can tell from looking at me i was not physically imposing at five feet tall i had to look up at my students the taller ones towered over me there was always chaos in the classroom when i could get the kids into the class

5:49 half the time they were in the hallway so i knew i wasn't cut out for teaching so did the principal and when he fired me after about six weeks i actually felt relief something resembling gratitude still it was a shock to fail so abysmally so quickly out of college but it turned out to be the biggest break i ever had because it enabled me to stumble into public radio and this sounds like a

6:20 cliche but i really believe failure can be a blessing in disguise i never would have thought a career in radio was possible for me when i was growing up in the 1950s and 60s there were very few women on radio and broadcasting was only one of many professions women were virtually absent from in my neighborhood most of the women were full-time homemakers the few who held paying jobs worked in what were then the only professions open to women

6:48 teaching nursing secretarial work or they helped out with their husbands businesses i had no clue how to break into any profession other than these but after being forced out of teaching and then doing temp work i ask myself so what do i really want to do and i realized i wanted to work in media but but how i mean i was never confident enough nor assertive enough to think such a career was feasible fortunately there was public radio where

7:15 women's voices were starting to be heard i became a volunteer at a college radio station where just about everyone on the air was a volunteer public radio stations were different then they hardly had any money or listeners so i was able to learn on the air without much complaint about how ridiculously amateurish i sounded which was a good thing because my voice was about an octave higher than it is now i spoke a lot faster than i do now and i

7:44 think i sounded like a feminist minnie mouse but it soon became apparent i'd found my place and once i started doing radio i came to realize there was a gap of sorts between the person i was on the air and the person i was in private life on the air i am capable of asking anybody anything but take away the mic and i can become uncomfortable self-conscious and insecure in my personal life i try to be nice to

8:13 people i want them to like me i was socialized to be accommodating something i think i share with most women of my generation and perhaps yours as well but when i started producing a radio show i had to learn to say no i have to reject people who want to be on fresh air but aren't accomplished or interesting enough to be on i also need to be willing to ask guests challenging questions and to deal with

8:37 the consequences if my questions rub them or some listeners or bloggers the wrong way i'm telling you all this because i suspect that many of you are going to experience a similar dichotomy between the person you are on the job and the person you are in private life but that's okay it's all part of the total you i hope that you all go on from here to fulfilling lives and careers just be aware these might not be the lives or

9:06 careers that others envision for you or that you envision for yourselves right now and that's okay if i'm any example college may be a laboratory for experimentation and self-transformation but commencement leaving the lab and becoming a full-fledged adult doesn't mean you're going to stop growing when i left college i realize now the only thing i knew for sure was that i wanted a life different from my parents remember how i mentioned that few women in my neighborhood worked outside the

9:37 home i wanted a career and i didn't feel compelled to marry right away if at all i decided not to have children and was fortunate in being from the first generation of american women who had the effective birth control that made that choice possible and and the first generation of women for whom changing social standards meant that those of us who reached middle age without having become mothers would no

10:08 longer be regarded with pity i know i know now that each generation of young adults and maybe each generation of young women in particular at least holds the potential based on their own experiences and desires to change the expectations of adult life in some small or perhaps some sizable way it's your turn now and based on all

10:39 you've accomplished so far all that brought you here today i'd say you're going to do great but what i really want to say most of all is congratulations thank you