If ever there was a glorious place to be last weekend, it was brilliant, sunny Pittsburgh, at the graduation ceremony of Carnegie Mellon University. In the week that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook as a $115bn company, the School of Computer Science launched some 250 global young people into the workplace. As the Dean of the school put it, “If there is a recession out there, nobody’s told us about it. Our students have been sought after by companies large and small for their problem solving and computing skills.” Certainly, the fields that have emerged: Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Biology, Computer Science, Software Research, Language Technologies, Machine Learning and Robotics, are the way of the future. Liberal Arts and Business graduates, take note. How is it that you can add value in this environment?
I hear a story of a professor who throws chalk at students who fall asleep in his classroom. He may be the world’s most boring teacher, or perhaps his students work (or party?) so hard that they are exhausted when they come to class, but when the guys get hit with a stinging thud, they wake up and laugh. It’s all taken as a good-natured ribbing. When he tries the same trick on a young woman, she wakes up and bursts into tears. The professor and classroom full of EQ-challenged males simply don’t understand her response or know what to do, and wait for her to pull herself together. This is the same young woman who wins an award for services to the school – her student-tours account for a significant number of applicants. Fast forward to the workplace. Let us hope that she, and others like her, end up in an environment that accepts that her sensitivities and sensibilities may be different from those of her male colleagues, and can also see and leverage the contributions she will make.
My own son, who knew very little about his field when he entered the school as a freshman, now leaves with enough skills and confidence to enter the workforce as a young computer scientist. But once again, he is at a threshold, a freshman in the business world, with much, much more to learn. Will he be a successful contributor? Will he find himself on a leadership path? If so, he will again have much to learn.
The piece of advice that stands out most to me is that given by a young man who graduated only two years ago. He tells his audience: “Only do what you are insanely passionate about. And if you don’t know what that is, keep trying till you find it. You are too smart, too good, and too well educated to settle for less.” Are those the words of a naïve idealist or a young sage, to whom we could all pay some attention?