Mira Sethi ’10 Excerpts From the Student Commencement Speech
IT WAS [HENRY] JAMES WHO MUSED that “deep experience is never peaceful.” Wellesley women, rather than shying away from the complicated truth of that statement, have celebrated and embraced a complex understanding of the world—and, especially, of a woman’s experience in it. Wellesley’s greatest gift to us has been the enabling of difficult and important conversations, those that have reminded us, if anything, that the universe does not revolve around us. Whether it’s mentoring students in Boston or volunteering at a shelter in Bangladesh, the phrase “Women Who Will” means that we have not been,
as a quirky man once put it, marooned in our own skulls. So when you go out today, celebrate the privilege of having spoken your mind, and of having passionately believed in a cause, and of having asked tough questions. But celebrate also the uncertainty that has attended that experience—the difficult pleasure of the journey that led us, in the first place, to ask those questions. To read all of the commencement speeches in full, visit http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/ Commencement/index.html. Summer 2010 Wellesley
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