"Most Likely to Succeed"

For those of you who missed it, here is the link to my Ivy Oration at Harvard's Class Day 2008:

http://harvardmagazine.com/web/commencement/ivy-oration-wu-2008

Wardrobe: my mom! She made this lovely canary yellow silk shell. But don't worry, it wasn't made in a sweatshop.

and here are the other speeches from that day:

http://harvardmagazine.com/web/commencement/ivy-oration-bailey-2008
Will Bailey, my new hero; "The Federal Funds Rate and the Channels of Monetary Transmission"

http://harvardmagazine.com/web/commencement/harvard-oration-shakir-2008
Deena Shakir, "From Baghdad to Boston: Dropping the Global H-Bomb"

http://harvardmagazine.com/web/commencement/harvard-oration-melvoin-2008
Nick Melvoin, "How to Tell a Harvard Man"

Speech Transcript:
"Most Likely to Succeed"

Well, it’s about time.

They changed the order of the program on us without telling you to build up anticipation for my speech.

You can bring out the really big cameras now!

Ladies and Gentlemen. Classmates, parents, children. Lovers and friends. Federal Reserve Board Chairman. Rain gods who I angered this morning…

When the senior class committee announced that I would be the class day speaker, I didn’t think I would draw such a large crowd.
Because at Harvard, I’m accustomed to attention—only of the negative kind.
In fact, I have always suspected, as have many of my peers, that I was the admissions mistake.

Listen to this. In the fall of 2003 Vivien Chu, a talented bassoon player and competitive power lifter, applied to Harvard. I don’t know for sure if our files were accidentally switched in Byerly Hall, but I was always confused by the fact that I never applied here. Vivien Chu, meanwhile, just graduated from Wellesley College. We still keep in touch and she seems to be doing all right.

Well, when I finally got to Harvard, I was expecting everybody else to be the next Olympic athlete, or the son of a famous politician.

I thought I would find someone here who was the best cellist since Yo Yo Ma…the heirs to famous imported beer labels…the founders of websites about how to get into Harvard…dot net…and the best juggler, unicyclist, magician, and comedian—all rolled into one.

You can imagine the inferiority complex I had, then, when I first set foot in Harvard Yard. It was an innocent time, a time before Facebook photos had been invented, and the only way to creep on our future classmates was through the airbrushed glamour photos everyone submitted to the Freshman Register. I was in awe of my classmates before I had ever met them. I was filled with anticipation, dread, fear of inadequacy, and questions. So many questions.

Would I set the low end of the curve? ….Yes

Would I work up the strength and courage to do a kegstand? …Yes

Would I be sexiled by my roommate? …Yes

Over and over? …Yes

Would I sexile my roommate? Hell yeah. I mean, no, no. I mean, only on those Friday nights that I said I was from BU.

This was the stuff Harvard was actually made of. Not geniuses, not the pride of America’s youth, just regular people. Through all of these experiences with you, I found out…that you were just like me.
You had grown up in the suburbs and attended well-funded public high schools.
You were the 9^th ranked student in your graduating class, but your extracurriculars were strong.
Your families weren’t rich, but they were comfortable.
Some of you were from exotic places, like Canada or Puerto Rico…but even you were actually normal people like me.
And you were all still Asian.

I was relieved…but at the same time, a little disappointed.
So as I made my way through Harvard, I became…jaded. The luster of the Harvard dream became tarnished, the veneer of Veritas cracked.

I found out that college was kind of like…Old School…without Will Ferrell, or anyone above a 7. And we had just missed out on Snoop Dogg. Despite what I had heard, everyone was an average student who was underwhelmingly normal.

Soon I realized that that wouldn’t be good enough for my parents. See, my parents are traditional Asian parents…They eat Pocky, my mom is really good at Dance Dance Revolution and twirling glowsticks, and my dad is the guy in the Nintendo Wii commercial who says “We would like to play.” So it wasn’t long before they started asking me questions about what Harvard was really like.

I tried to stall for some time. But they kept asking me, what are we spending over $40,000 a year on, after all?
“Do you know how much that is in DDR tokens?!” my mom screamed at me.

Well, I couldn’t tell them that I had been living on a monochromatic diet of chickwiches and ranger cookies, because most things HUDS made were a pale shade of orange. I had to give them something that would satisfy them, and fast. I had to let them know that my time had NOT been spent sleeping through lecture, and my allowance had NOT been spent entirely on bottom-shelf vodka…and that special burrito I ask for at Felipe’s with chicken, steak, AND carnitas.

So, what is a typical day in the life of a Harvard student?

7am. Wake up, and start the day with a little sculling in my seersucker pants and top-siders.
8am. Eat balanced breakfast. Do homework in marble and gold-covered library with the most books in the ENTIRE world.
Noon. Attend lecture from world-renowned professor resembling character from The Simpsons, followed by section with TF who looks exactly like Inspector Gadget.
2pm. Work in stem cell lab with state-of-the-art technology. Finally finish malaria vaccine, without killing any of the stem cells.
3pm. Go to OCS to pick up latest offers from investment banking recruiters. “You’ll have to do better than that!” I laugh, shaking my head.
6pm. Dinner. I only eat two chicken fingers, and don’t gain any weight.
Midnight. Get initiated into Final Club. Make out with Natalie Portman.

That’s just a typical day for us at Harvard.

Well, my web of lies saved me for a while. But as I experienced more of Harvard, it started to unravel…and fall apart faster than a Fly-By sandwich.

Like the family member of a comic book superhero, I began to find out everybody’s secret powers.

I found out…that Tom Yahoo, the person I had worked with on the UC, had actually started a website worth millions of dollars…when he was TEN years old.

My own blockmate, who I thought wasted his days on video games and ordering Kong…he had actually rigged his Xbox so it looked like he was playing Halo when he was writing computer science code.

The girl I was used to seeing on walks of shame down Mount Auburn Street...damn, she was Phi Beta Kappa! Get it, gurl.

The dumb jock that I had negged hard—I found out later that he had perfect LSAT scores and got into Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law. (I would live to regret that one.)

I couldn’t believe it one day, when I was standing next to my friend and a meteor fell next to me. He picked it up and threw it back into outer space. It turned out he was a really good shot putter on the track and field team.

So it was comforting to finally discover that my dreams of Harvard being the greatest repository of talent on the planet were true after all.
Then reality hit me again. I was still mediocre compared to everyone else.
I was still sitting in the back of the lecture hall, snoozing while you were taking the copious notes that I would boost for studying for the final…but you would still score two standard deviations higher because you were actually smart. I was still the unemployed senior without a Fulbright scholarship or summa designation to my name.

But looking at you gathered here today, I am so proud of all of you. Even though I seemingly had nothing to do with your success, consider that I have perhaps inadvertently helped you by setting the low end of the curve. So I feel like we accomplished it together.
That Goldman Sachs offer? I was right there with you!
That acceptance to your top-choice medical school? We finally did it!

Well, maybe I just like to play out these fantasies of success in my mind. Surely you won’t begrudge a college student in a recession a moment of happiness.
Maybe after this I can get in good on the inside and get a job at the Fed…

Recession or no, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that in 20 years you will be the next Wall Street tycoons. The next great educators and eminent public servants. Maybe the next presidential candidate. Definitely the next white collar criminal.

Yes, our trajectories after college will exceed all of our wildest dreams. Unless, like me, you peaked in high school. But when you are off being a successful go-getter, remember your roots, and remember how your success was hinged on the failures of those lesser than you.
I will remember that the greatest measure of my success is what I can do to achieve success for those around me. I have pushed you forward, and now I hope to be carried along with you. I would consider it my function, as it was in college, to make you look good.
So, if you’re in your residency at Harvard Med, and you need to separate yourself from the rest of the pack, I can probably cut someone’s jugular in the ER for you.
When you’re trying to cure Alzheimer’s Disease, I’ll be researching something completely useless…like how to put four human legs on a dog.
When you’re the Federal Reserve Board Chairman and you somehow find yourself with a subprime mortgage crisis on your hands, I can be the treasury underling on whom you blame the state of the economy.
When you’re an ambitious young i-banker, I will break into your office in a homeless man costume and act out scenes from The Pursuit of Happiness.

Well, there will be plenty of that in the future. For now, let’s reflect on what Harvard has really taught us. Four years of hauling ass, and finally we have gotten to this moment. What will stay with us when we have walked through the gates, packed up our boxes, and go out into the real, “no free lunch” world? What will then commence?

Some things I am glad to leave behind, like disposable plastic furniture, and textbook price gouging. But there are definitely things I’ll miss.
Never again will we be able to swipe our way to unlimited golden nuggets, or have instant access to this many freshman dorms.
I don’t know if the enormity of that fact has fully hit you yet.
Never again will we be surrounded by over 6500 single attractive young adults.
Wait, maybe that’s a lie.

Listen, our time at Harvard is winding down. Three years and eight months of sexual tension have finally given way to one week of awkward Datamatched sex. We are adults, firmly grounded in our 20’s. We have conquered Harvard, and now we must conquer the world. Some of you will make it better, and some of you will make it worse. Some of you will just be happy to get married before you’re thirty, others before she’s thirty.
Some of you will return in thirty years to give speeches, or watch your children graduate. And one of us will return in thirty years because Au Bon Pain is hiring.
We have the rest of our lives to achieve something, and at least for now, we all think we can.
Especially me. By consistently setting the low end of the curve, I assured the success of you, my classmates. And today, looking out at all of you, I feel like the most successful person of all.

Congratulations, and thank you.