This morning s ceremony is rich in the kind of pageantry, color and ritual we associate with momentous occasions, as well it should be. The robes and hoods, the processional music, formal invocations, and high seriousness of it all are meant to reinforce the significance of this event. I hope you are enjoying them. You have certainly earned them. But now comes the harder part.
Additional challenges lie ahead.
And while I cannot predict which of you will blaze far beyond the boundaries of achievement as they are now drawn, and which will go about your business with little fanfare but no less success, I can say, with confidence, that all of you are capable and well prepared for a life of learning, as you must be to match the rapid changes of the contemporary world. In this past year I have had the privilege and the great good fortune to act as interim president of The Johns Hopkins University. I have found it to be a tremendously energizing and satisfying experience. Or the candidate in the Masters of Public Health program who will have to hurry home after commencement because he has just been named Commissioner of Health for the State of West Virginia. Or the young woman who is delaying her graduate studies at Yale to establish and run an oral rehydration project for infants and children in the slums of Dhaka in Bangladesh.