Graduation speech

Good afternoon, faculty, families, friends, and the Computer Science Class of 2026. If our time together were a program, none of us would have written the requirements this way. We began with the unfinished code of the pandemic years. Routines were interrupted. Friendships were compressed into squares on a screen. Classrooms opened and closed. Plans changed without warning. We learned early that systems can fail—not because people lack talent, but because the environment changes faster than anyone expects. And yet, here we are. Over these years, we became more than students. We became maintainers of one another’s hope. When something broke, we learned to debug it. We did not pretend the error was gone. We looked closer. We asked better questions. We tried again. I remember one late project night. A team’s application stopped working hours before the deadline. Everyone was exhausted. The logs were useless. The group could have scattered in frustration. Instead, one person ordered food. Another drew the architecture on a whiteboard. Then someone noticed a single misplaced character. The fix took seconds. Finding it took patience, trust, and the willingness to stay. That is resilience: not flawless execution, but returning to the problem together. There was another moment, quieter but just as important. A classmate who had struggled through remote learning volunteered to help a first-year student understand recursion. They expected a ten-minute explanation. They stayed for an hour. By the end, both understood the concept better. Sometimes, the best way to rebuild our confidence is to use what we know in service of someone else. Our central lesson may be this: life is not a finished product. It is open-source. We inherit systems, ideas, and communities built by those who came before us. Some are elegant. Some contain bugs. Some exclude people they were never designed to consider. Our responsibility is not merely to run the code. It is to examine it. I