probably settled on that goal and that path over the course of your studies. certainly, higher education is a big investment, and everyone needs a plan for recouping that investment - in terms of income, of course, but also in terms of opening other opportunities that education can provide. as a professor of public policy at georgetown, i always hoped to provide tools that would be useful for graduating students in their new jobs. and i do know, given the caliber of batten, that your studies here have helped you to not only attain the tools and knowledge you will need moving forward but also to make the contacts and build the networks that will help you in your careers. most importantly, i hope that your time at uva has opened your eyes to opportunities that you hadn't even imagined when you first set foot on grounds. importantly, i do hope that you have learned over your time here about the many ways in which public policy work can be fulfilling for you personally and can also allow you to improve the lives of others, whether pursuing work on housing affordability, budget priorities, or access to health and education ; building infrastructure capacity ; or tackling financial stability. ultimately, public policy and leadership are about helping people. 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches it is with that latter point in mind that i am going to tell you about my own experience and the importance of allowing yourself to take risks and follow your own path as you pursue a career in public service. while this may contradict some of the advice you have received about managing your careers, i strongly believe that it will make you more successful and more fulfilled in the long run. i tell you this because i am probably an unlikely person to have been appointed to the federal reserve board, as the first latin policymaker in the fed's history. i was raised in colombia and came to the united states at age 15, speaking almost no english. i attended public schools. in high school, i carried around to every class one of those thick merriam - webster dictionaries because, of course, back then there was no google translate on smartphones, and also no smartphones! another thing i carried with me, along with my dictionary, was the memory from my childhood of traveling around colombia with my parents and witnessing great poverty and the suffering and social problems that come from poverty. at an early age, my brother and i would accompany my parents to shantytowns around bogota to help with social projects, and

we traveled the countryside to visit my maternal grandparents, who lived in one of the poorest states in the country. i would spend my summer with my grandparents since both my parents worked. my grandfather, who had to leave high school as a teenager to help his widowed mother raise his five siblings, would take us to his dairy farm at four o'clock in the morning to help milk the cows and put the milk in stainless steel tanks. traveling the unpaved roads into town, we would then stop at various stores to sell the milk. but my grandpa's day was just getting started, because he was also the mayor of his town, and every morning, he would open his office and deal with the business of being mayor. while my grandpa never graduated from high school, he was an autodidact, and he worked hard to put all his siblings and his six children through college, and he saw serving as mayor as a way to help his neighbors. the memories of my grandfather overcoming many obstacles but also devoting his life to helping others were certainly an inspiration and remain a source of motivation for me even today. in fact, i remember going back to visit my grandparents over the years, summer after summer, and seeing the new roads that had been paved and the improved school and health clinic in the town and seeing how a life devoted to public service can improve lives. so when going to college, while not totally definite about what to study, i found that the memories from my childhood and the desire to find ways to address poverty guided my decision to gravitate toward economics and political science, and i figured the best path for me was to work in public policy. in particular, i discovered that economics was a science that would allow me to better combine my interest in math with my desire to help address poverty, so i moved in that direction, pursuing a phd. i want to emphasize that my career was not linear or perfectly planned, but rather i have chosen to take detours. and, importantly, i have chosen to take risks along the way. yet what was always a constant was my commitment to use my technical expertise to tackle poverty and social challenges. but i also could have never imagined that some of the detours i took would actually help me down the road in preparing me for my current role. 2 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches as an undergrad, i decided to apply out of the blue for an internship with the junior senator from maryland at the